Eyes squeezed shut in love don’t help, nor soft beds far from the pestilent sick,
from the conqueror who advances, pace by pace, with his flag.
For life throbs like a bile, like a river; it opens
a bloody tunnel where eyes stare through at us,
the eyes of a huge and sorrowful family.

This poem is about love for humanity as well as romantic love. It is also a poem my students will read next week in their study of the literature of love. As members of Neruda’s huge and sometimes happy, sometimes “sorrowful family,” my students will read this poem and, I hope, discuss the responsibility humans bear for each other, and how culpable each of us is concerning human suffering. Before they read Pablo Neruda’s poetry, they will learn about his background and a little about the history of his country, Chile, during Neruda’s lifetime. While they read and research, I hope they will make connections between Neruda’s world and their own. Many of these connections, particularly about love and fear, relationships and passion, life and death, will be of the universal variety. But some of these connections will be more specific, and some of them will reveal an unpleasant connection between Neruda’s country and our own. I want them to see and understand these connections, but I want them also to understand that progress can be made, and that progress lies in rectifying one’s mistakes.

Other students will begin reading Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical Night, and, again, before they read, they will do research. In the case of this research, they will look at World War II and the Holocaust, and they will see their own country reflected in a positive and heroic light, as the rescuers of the victims of Nazism. As they read I want them to consider the similarities between the young Wiesel and themselves, and to see their hopes and dreams in what he has written about his own. And as they continue to read and near the book’s end, they will see Wiesel liberated from a death camp when he is beyond hope, and it will be American soldiers who are his saviors.

They will also do extra readings that raise worrisome questions, such as why the U.S, Great Britain, and Russia waited so long before liberating the camps, and why the U.S., along with other countries, turned away a ship filled with Jewish refugees, sending them back to certain imprisonment or death. Again, the issues raised are not always pleasant or flattering to us as Americans, but they are necessary in forcing us to think about what we owe one another, and what we owe the world in terms of who is responsible for whom, and to what extent.

Even if teachers have at their intellectual and physical disposal the words that might inspire students to think for themselves, to ask the hard questions, they still have the difficult task of making those words relevant. After all, W.H. Auden tells us, “Poetry changes nothing.” And in America, where poets earn minimum wage teaching composition and creative writing in universities, and who publish their own poetry as a side, poetry does change very little, because it’s so little read. But Auden, whose “Poetry changes nothing” is often taken out of context, also admonished teachers NOT to teach poetry with a capital “P” as a pastime for dilettantes and snobs. As for those who would question the value of words, and, in particular, words used creatively in the form of a poem, Auden tells us that if “... [poetry] sometimes gives us escape, let us be grateful, for we all need a certain amount of escape, just as we need sleep; but [poetry] also tells us the truths which we are too busy or too ashamed to see.” Because words can force us to see unsavory truths about ourselves, and make us see the cause for shame, they actually can foment change. So I continue introducing myself and my sometimes reluctant, sometimes eager learners to the words spoken by unfamiliar people from unfamiliar times in parts of the world foreign and often inhospitable to ourselves. I do so because I believe I owe my students every means possible in finding their own answer to the question of what one person owes another.

The ancient Greeks, whose civilization provides the underpinnings of what is most valuable in our own, believed that the study of truth, goodness, and beauty were necessary to produce the best citizens. They also knew that, in order to arrive at those ideals, the other side of the three ideals must also be examined. Luckily for teachers in this century, rather than creating our own truth-seeking curriculum (as did Socrates) and thus acting as a gadfly to our society, (and, as a consequence, being forced to drink a draught of hemlock, though committee meetings may be the equivalent), we instead have all the previous centuries’ writers and their truths to draw upon, from “Oedipus Rex” to “Things Fall Apart,” from Sappho to Neruda, and from Homer’s “Odysse”y to Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Woman Warrior.” In all of these writings, humans grapple with the complexities and brevity of human life, and so insightful students can always glean truth and draw necessary connections to their own lives. And in every work, questions arise about how we relate to others and to whom we are ultimately responsible.

In the pursuit of the connection between words and responsibility, another Nobel prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote these words in a poem called “Dedication” in Warsaw in 1945: “What is poetry which does not save/ Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies ... .” The part of this poem that seems most germane to me is the part that reads, “A connivance with official lies.” And its importance to me, as an English teacher, is that it reminds me that words should help us find what is real and genuine.

But we live in such a complicated, layered world. How is a student to find any balance, to find what is true and what is “official [or unofficial] lies” when the American president says to the nation that “we are a good country” but our better history books speak of the deadly mistakes of Vietnam? What if everything we’ve read and seen depicts capitalism and democracy as the choice of all free peoples, but even superficial research tells us that our government was behind a coup that replaced Chile’s legally elected Socialist president Salvador Allende with the military dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (who was far more sympathetic to American business interests than Allende)? What about when students read, on the one hand, the words of President John F. Kennedy that say, “We in this country, in this generation are — by destiny rather than choice —the watchmen on the walls of world freedom,” and then a few decades later, the words of the Secretary of State Colin Powell (ironically, the least “hawkish” of the president’s advisors) define our new foreign policy as being that of “the bully on the block”?

And how can a student make up his or her mind in good conscience without feeling traitorous when our political leaders vote overwhelmingly to support an attack on Iraq, but the United Nations equally overwhelmingly votes against the use of military force? And at this point, how can students find any balance in our own seeming eagerness for a war with Iraq (based on its development of weapons of mass destruction, or based on its oil reserves?) with our careful diplomatic approach to North Korea’s fully developed weapons of mass destruction (and no oil reserves)?

And, for that matter, what about our own weapons of mass destruction? After all, we are the only country ever to use atomic weapons on other humans, even though we justify that use, just as we find moral justification for all of our actions. The hardest question for me, at this point, is how much more can a thinking American, even a patriot, even a teacher of America’s oh-so-impressionable youth, justify in terms of what we as Americans think is best for the world? Might the thought come to mind that we are primarily thinking of what is best for us as Americans, and that, as the richest industrial country with the world’s mightiest military, we already have it pretty good?

In a 1953 poem titled “Child of Europe,” Milosz wrote, “Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision. / Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.” These lines, in my mind, bear a frightening similarity to America’s new foreign policy concerning predictions and preemptive strikes, and so perhaps they are lines I won’t discuss in any depth in class. This column has become my forum, but I will not use my classroom for that purpose. Were I to do so, I would exhibit the same arrogance as the government — my own government — which I criticize for forcing its assumptions on the rest of the world. The powerful position that a teacher holds in the classroom does not lend itself to politics. I do not want to cross the line between the teacher who exposes her students to knowledge, and the teacher who forces on students her own views — most importantly, views not at all in keeping with those of the majority of Americans (at least, based on election results). I am afraid that, were I to politically interpret what I teach, then what Jean Paul Sartre’s fellow Frenchman, Charles De Gaulle, once said of America might be applied to myself, that I might “yield in [my] turn to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloak[s] itself.”

And so I will instead continue to search for something like equilibrium, and I will try to carefully examine what I read and hear, and then I will lay before 15- and 16-year-olds what little I know. Maybe, in my search for the calm of balance and integrity, I might approach my introduction of world literature and history as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz suggested his countrymen approached the world — as something one might redeem rather than perfect. Sartre thought other people were hell. But General William T. Sherman, a century before, had already narrowed the definition when he wrote to his wife, “War is hell.” Maybe we Americans should pay more attention to Socrates’ “The unexamined life isn’t worth living,” and scrutinize our own lives and motivations a little more closely as we mass troops in the Persian Gulf. Maybe what we really owe each other is one more chance for redemption. It may be the only exit on the road that leads to war.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a teacher and writer who lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)