“Is it your expectation that every intelligent species in the universe is accursed?”
“No.”
Ishmael studied me for a moment and said, “I see that your question remains unanswered. Let me answer it this way. Even at your age, you’ve probably already met a certain kind of person who is convinced that anything bad that happens in his life is someone else’s fault—never his own. If you haven’t met such a person, I can guarantee that you will do so someday. Such a person never learns from his mistakes, because as far as he’s concerned, he makes no mistakes. He never discovers the sources of his difficulties, because he believes those sources lie in others who are beyond his control. To put it very simply, everything that goes wrong in his life he blames on others. He never says to himself, ‘The problem is something I’m doing.’ He says, ‘The problem is something other people are doing. Other people are to blame for all my troubles—and I can’t change them, so I’m helpless.’ ”
“Yeah, I know someone like that,” I told him. I didn’t see any reason to tell him it was my mother.
“Your entire culture has adopted this way of dealing with your difficulties. You don’t say, ‘The problem is something we’re doing.’ You say, ‘The problem is human nature itself. Human nature is to blame for all our troubles—and we can’t change that, so we’re helpless.’ ”
“Yow,” I said. “I get it.”
“I too get it, Julie,” Ishmael said. “Teachers need pupils to help them continue their own journey of discovery.”
I raised my brows at him.
“You’ve heard me say a dozen times that the people of your culture think of themselves as belonging to a flawed, doomed race.”
“That’s right,” I told him.
“Now, thanks to you, I have a much better way of saying this: The people of your culture blame human nature for their troubles. It’s still true that you think of yourselves as belonging to a flawed, doomed race, but now we both have a better understanding of why you think of yourselves this way. It serves a purpose. It enables you to shift blame from yourselves to something that is beyond your control—human nature. You are blameless. The fault is in human nature itself, which you cannot change.”
“Right. I see that.”
“Let me take a moment to state that ‘human nature’ is something the people of your culture claim to know about. It’s not something I claim to know about. Whenever I use the term, it will be as it comes from the mouth of Mother Culture. The very concept is foreign to me. It belongs to an epistemological framework unique to your culture. Don’t make faces. It won’t hurt you to hear a new word. Epistemology is the study of what is knowable. To the people of your culture, ‘human nature’ is a knowable object. To me, it’s a fabulous object, an object invented to be searched for, like the Holy Grail or the philosopher’s stone.”
“Okay,” I told him. “But I don’t know why you’re insisting on all this.”
His face twisted into a smile. “I’m talking to posterity through you, Julie.”
“Come again?”
“Teachers live on through their pupils. That’s another reason why they need them. You seem to have an unusual memory. You remember what you hear with unusual clarity.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.”
“You’re going to be my rememberer. You’ll carry my words beyond the walls of this room.”
“Carry them where?”
“Wherever you go—wherever that may be.”
Well, I spent some time frowning over all this. Then I said, “What about Alan? Is he a rememberer too?”
Ishmael shrugged. “I suppose I may as well go into this now, Julie. I’ve had many pupils. Some have taken nothing from me, some have taken a little, and some have taken a lot. But none has taken all. Each takes as much as he or she can carry away. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“What they do with what they take is obviously beyond my control. For the most part, I have no idea what they do with it—or if they do anything at all. One recently wrote to me with his own strange notion of what to do. He intends to immigrate to Europe and set himself up as a sort of itinerant lecturer or preacher there.”
“What did you want him to do?”
“Oh, it isn’t at all a matter of what I want. Each must do what is within his or her compass. I call the notion strange only because it’s inconceivable to me. I know only how to bring people along in this context—through dialogue. I simply can’t imagine doing it in a lecture hall. My deficiency, not his.”
“I’m feeling lost, Ishmael. What’s this got to do with Alan and me?”
“When I called you my rememberer, you asked if Alan is also a rememberer. I wanted you to understand that what I’m giving you to remember is very different from what I’m giving him to remember. No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike.”
“Okay. That makes sense.”