Last week, I looked at my syllabus randomly sometime after 3:00pm on the way out of the office having just finished a lecture on the Election of 1796 with my Tuesday-Thursday survey. I expected to see, next to the date of then-tomorrow’s class, something to the general effect of “The Federalist Era,” or maybe, if I was really far behind, “The War of 1812.” (And for the record, no, my syllabi are not filled with bland, stupid titles like that. I’m trying to tell a story and save Internet space.) In any case, what originated as an honest glance intent on comforting my brain and soul with affirmation that was I was not in fact horrible at what I do turned into a panic-inducing, wide-eyed stare that likely lasted more than a comfortable number of minutes. The lecture scheduled for the next day was not one that logically followed that which I had given the previous class. Indeed, it wasn’t even in the same century, era, or school of thought. What my eyes saw, and what impressed itself into my nightmares for the rest of my brain’s functional life was the title “I Have Lived a Life of Joy With You: Walt Whitman and the American Literary Tradition.”

I’m going to go ahead and assume that the lot of you understand that the Federalist Era and Walt Whitman’s entrance onto the American literary landscape fall something like fifty years apart. How did I get so far behind, especially without ever realizing what was happening? I was honestly confounded, and in some ways still am. At no point in the preceding weeks had I felt as though I was spending too much time on one thing or another. In fact, just a week earlier I had complained to a colleague that I didn’t have as much time to discuss the Enlightenment as I wanted. I needed to move on. Time was pressing and the midterm was coming up. So I moved on and, at some point between then and the moment I looked at my syllabus the next week, I fell into a hole.

This got me thinking of a class I took as an undergrad. At Spring Hill College there taught a man named John Welch. An assistant professor for 42 years due to his only having an M.A., Prof. Welch freely admitted that he had fallen into the job because “at some point in the 60s, the Jesuits all left and they hired me to replace them. I guess they never noticed that I didn’t leave.” Welch was one of those special characters you meet only once but remember forever. For two short years before his retirement due to illness, I took every class possible with him—“The U.S. South,” “America Between the Wars” (which had four students in it), and “Lewis and Clark.” He had no PowerPoints; he wrote on no boards; he assigned W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South as a textbook; and he took his time with everything.

It was this last point that struck me in my office after what we’ll call the “Syllabus Incident of 2016.” He took his time. The last class I ever took with him was the class he said was the story of his life: “U.S., 1945 to present.” With no hyperbole I can honestly tell you that we were off the syllabus midway through the second class. It didn’t even survive the week. Instead of lectures, we got memoirs of a boyhood in Florida, wartime summers at The Breakers where his father was a manager, and the niceties of private school life in the segregated South. It was cinematic, personal, and nothing short of honest. It was a class as much as it was an oral history, just with three credits attached.

I don’t think I ever heard more complaints from my colleagues as each class with Welch came and went, every semester a new group of initiates lamenting the drudgery of his lectures, his sleepy eyes, and his note-less stories that often required a minute-long gaze up into the ceiling to retrieve the proper language or epithet, long since mastered but with age increasingly fleeting. But that spring, in that class, no one said a word. As properly trained pupils, we all took notes for the first ten minutes, then placed the pens down and listened. We could study for exams with the book.

We made it to 1965 that semester—twenty full years. Kennedy was two years dead, American involvement in Vietnam was getting real, and John Welch, fresh out of a short and uneventful stint in the army, was teaching his first semester at Spring Hill in a state whose governor, George Wallace, openly opposed the one-year-old Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was nothing of Watergate, Iran, Reagan, or walls falling down, nothing of Bush’s father, Kuwait, Clinton, or sexual relations. We got only twenty years of life lived.

Why, then, do I remember this course, which stands far outside my academic specialty by at least a full century, more than any course I took in my twenty-odd years of schooling? I think now, given time to wonder, that it was the detail. With broad strokes we get forms. With targeted color and short flicks we get life. Teaching history comes down to time allowed, what fits and what doesn’t. Although I can’t reasonably sit here and write that detail supersedes the syllabus and “making it to the end,” I kind of am. Sometimes the details make believers of skeptics—those otherwise lost in the blur. Sometimes it’s okay to find yourself fifty years behind.

Yours, as always,

ANW