Читать книгу How to Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree - Elof Axel Carlson - Страница 11

Morris Gabriel Cohen (1900–1972) was a teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, NY. His father was a cigar maker and a friend of Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor. Cohen was drafted in WWI and served overseas in England and France. He returned to New York and attended Columbia University on a scholarship. He said he “majored in everything useless”. He participated in the first presentation of Columbia’s famous Contemporary Civilization of the West. While in college his vision deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with Leber’s optic atrophy, a progressive loss of vision whose cause was unknown at the time. It is a maternally inherited mitochondrial disease with retinal degeneration. He dropped plans for graduate school and became a high school teacher. He taught history, but I knew him through a lucky occurrence. I was sitting in the dark in an empty auditorium using an exit light to read. He walked in and must have heard me moving. He asked me what I was reading and why I was reading there. I told him I liked to read, and I came in early because my father had to leave early to get to his job and I left shortly after he did. He invited me to his office and asked me if I would like to read aloud to him. We started with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and then went to the trio of Socrates’ arrest, trial, and death and worked our way over the next five years (the last four while I was at NYU) ending with Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. It was the most transforming intellectual experience of my life to read these aloud and discuss their implications for our lives. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing the mentoring of a millionaire’s child in the 1700s when private tutors shaped the minds of the children of the wealthy. He encouraged students to get PhDs. He felt law and medicine were well represented by talented students and that PhDs sustained and added to the richness of civilization.