the sophomores were supposed to have read hawthorne's tale "The Minister's Black Veil" for class today, but something wasn't right. so i asked them directly, "who has read this story to the end?" and three hands went up.

it's the tale of a minister who appears one day before his congregation wearing a black crape veil over the upper half of his face. he offers no explanation, ever, for this behavior ... and from that day on, he never removes the veil - not even after death.

but only three of my students would know this.

sitting here now, hours after the fact, i know what i should have done. i should have called those three to the desk, verified their reading with a few quick questions, and given them a wonderful mark in my grade book. i should have given a rotten mark to the rest. rewards and punishments. but i didn't. instead, i did another thing, which also needed doing.

i named a student and a page number and said "start reading out loud." and he did. and then others did. and we continued through the story until the bell cut us off. but we didn't actually read non-stop, because i found that as they read they often stumbled over and hesitated before words, phrases and whole sentences that they did not understand (and, truth be told, even those who read smoothly probably didn't get it...back in the day, i was one of those - a good performer).

i said "what does 'repose' mean? how about 'perturbation'?" and then we came to this passage at the wedding feast:

At that instant, catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking glass, the black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others. His frame shuddered, his lips grew white, he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet, and rushed forth into the darkness. For the Earth, too, had on her Black Veil.

no really tough words or bizarre syntax, but i stopped us. "what just happened?"

uncertainty, confusion, "uh, he spilled his wine."

"why?"

"uh, ..." then, "he saw the way he looked to everybody else."

"yes, and then..."

so it went. and we read on, but something had snapped in my brain. why was i thinking of medusa, the gorgon's head? and "shuddered" had just been used in the funeral episode where it was reported that "the corpse had slightly shuddered." and there's something about that mirror. i wanted to stop and think about this, but i couldn't. because we had to cover ground, we had to read the story, we had to beat the bell. no time for teacher's weird brainspasm. i could have become wildly, insanely obsesssed with these details. i would have flown off, pulse racing, and left the class behind, leaden-eyed weary and eager for the bell. but i didn't fly. i don't think any of us flew today. but it wasn't a bad day - even for that.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

Octavio Paz