We All Need Mentors
During the fall semester of my senior year in high school, my best friend at school, Pete, and I took a course with a new teacher to the school. The teacher wasn’t young, he was just new to the school (he was about 50 at the time). He was a Jesuit who had been raised in NJ, had been Dean of Students at Boston College, was transferred (as the Jesuits are with regularity) to Fairfield University (CT), and, after a few years there, asked to be transferred to our high school, Fairfield Prep (The Prep and the University share a campus, The Prep having been founded in 1942 and the University in 1953).

He didn’t want to teach college students anymore; he found them incurious, more concerned with what would be on the tests than in learning, he thought.

Well, we had been told from our first day at Prep that we were to express our minds and push back when we weren’t satisfied. I honestly don’t remember that we even had to raise our hands to speak (I may be romanticizing, but that’s what I remember). Most classes were a controlled exercise in debate, it seemed.

The new teacher’s name was Fr. Oliver Nickerson, S.J., and we quickly and joyfully called him Ollie in class. And he loved teaching that class; he didn’t find us incurious. And we loved him. All these years later, the mention of his name to a former classmate leads to warm memories and stories. He had found a new home.

The course was a survey of novellas and novels from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we read things like: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Faulkner’s The Bear, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and a dozen or so more of the greats.

One day, after we had read one of Dickens’s novel, I clearly remember asking Ollie in class: Ollie, why did you make us read that novel? It is nowhere as good as the other stuff we read so far. It was turgid and tedious, at best. Or words to that effect.

Without missing a beat, and without a note of condescension, Ollie said: Well, we want to expose you to the Canon at this young age. You are too young to fully understand these novels, but the exposure makes you better people. You see, he continued, there is only one good thing about getting older: it is the accretion of experience, and — -hopefully — wisdom. I hope you go back and re-read these books later in life. You will be surprised how much deeper your understanding will be.

And, lo and behold, Ollie was right. I have re-read many of those books, and many others, as the years have rolled along — and I have found that the accretion of experience really does deepen the understanding.

But I must say, Dickens is still turgid and tedious. That did not change.

Near the end of the semester, Pete and I asked Ollie if he would teach us a seminar on ancient Greek writing the next semester. We knew by then that the Greeks were Ollie’s greatest love. So, he asked the administration if he could each a two person class, and they approved. Each Friday night that last semester at Prep, Pete and I drove to Fairfield to the Jesuit house Ollie lived in and we had a 3 hour or so conversation about Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Euripdes, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, and others. It was fabulous, to say the least (Pete and I went on to college to minor in Classical Studies).

Ollie became a life-long friend. He went on a handful of vacations with our family once we had kids, and we sent him a big bottle of Bombay Sapphire and some books every once in a while. He came to our house once a year — by then he had been transferred to Jamaica — and he became a kind of uncle our kids.

Ollie died about decade ago. He left a big hole in the universe.

The good ones always do.
['Tim Moore']
['Books', 'Teachers', 'Mentorship', 'Classics', 'Greek Mythology']