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New Life

Those who changed my life and never knew they had done it ?

When I was a teenager, we got as teacher in French a rather special man. It was in the fifties, and those who had crossed the Atlantic, both to learn and to teach were not numerous. He had been over in the USA, he had taught.

Why a man who had published, a man who had taught in a College in USA would be teaching teenagers in a Paris suburb?

We were teenagers, we could not care less. But it was fun to mimic him.

He was a very old man, must have been approaching his fifties.

If you check on the net on Michel Zeraffa, you will find one book. He did not want us brats to read it because a few pages were above (or rather below) our capacity.

Having been over in the USA, he was twenty years in advance on his historical period. He was not much interested in the rules written by the Ministry as to what we should learn. All his teaching was based on trying to understand the motivations of the humans described in the books we were studying. Today that sound like something obvious; in those days, for teenagers, humans in books were not humans, they were just a bore, they had nothing to do with our problems.

Michel Zeraffa did not dream about capacity to understand, he knew quite well we were teenagers from well to do families, that our only goal was to get a well paid job with a well paid retirement. Understanding the mind and the passions of long dead persons was the least of our interests.

Michel Zeraffa, knowing that there was little hope of finding amongst us a heart that would beat faster when seeing the beauty and suffering of the humans living in books, took it upon himself to compensate his failure to teach us humanity by teaching us tricks.

Today, this is obvious. All students have a bag of tricks to hide their lack of knowledge.

Michel Zeraffa would give us a short story, something like a double sider, and ask us to comment and analyse the story, our presentation lasting twenty minutes.

Again this sounds like obvious stuff. For instance, in those days, given a text and asked to analyse it, we would first remain dumb, speechless, what was there to say about this?

So Michel Zeraffa taught us the first sentence which we could use for any text, sentence that would give us the time to wet our mouth and get started.

So our presentation would be:

<< This text of two pages was written by Nils Stalbrand, an author living in the twentieth Century. This text is a complete text/a part of a longer text.

The subject of this text is to introduce the dilemma of Adam who is in love with the same girl as his brother/ (or any sentence of this kind, which would simply be a rephrasing of the text).

This story is composed in three parts;

In the introduction the author is presenting the problem and the personages.

In the second part the author presents the solutions that are envisaged by the personages

In the third part the author analyses the consequences of the choices made by the personages.

What is noteworthy in this text is the very brief/long/short/ conclusion the author gives to the story.

If we analyse the methods used by the author we remark the length/shortness of the sentences. By using long/short/few/numerous paragraphs the authors finds a way to convey the strength/weakness/doubts of his personages.

The words used by the author are simple/very complex/concrete/abstract as the situation demands such an approach.

It is noticeable that the author takes distance/gets near/ is indifferent/is moved by the problems of the personages.

If we compare this text with the present day literature, we notice how far/near/remote/ his look at humanity is from ours.

Already in his look at humanity we can see that the author can be seen as one who sees how the future will develop.

And so on

Then we were armed with a rather limited stock of quotations that we should try and implant in our presentation:

<< the very short sentences reminds us of the problems Hemingway had with writing and yet he got the Nobel price>>

<< the long sentences which have paragraphs only as a printing convenience announce the French writers of the sixties, the long paragraphs being used to indicate the flow of history >>

All of it had as unique objective to prevent a 5/100 note, and using this system, we were quite sure that we would be floating around 50%. For boys, teenagers, in the French system, any note in French above 10% was considered as a major accomplishment, the fact that the girls had marks around 75% was just another illustration of their absurdity.

This teaching by Michel Zeraffa happened just at the right time for me, I was all in favour of tricks that would allow me to skip work. I had much more interesting thigns to do, such a reading Earle Stanley Gardner, his Perry Mason (in French!!!) and his less know characters written under the name A.A. Fair, with Berta Cool being Agency Director and Donald Lamb being a tramp who wanted a job at the Agency as a detective.

Berta could not see why she should enrol that tramp, Donald, so as a test she asks him to explain the sexual lives of mosquitoes. And Donald starts speaking and speaking, lining up one very logical lie after the other.

Both teachings together, does that explain how 10 years later I would be standing in front of African university Students in Uppsala, lecturing on Tropical Soils while I had never seen a Tropical Soil in my life and even had no idea of what Tropical could be. I got away with it as my Supervising Professor had no idea that for 10 years now the Americans had been using the Seventh Approximation of Soil Classification, while I knew the colour of the binding of this book.

Or is it that training that made it possible for me to work for four month as a UNIX Computer Specialist, having never seen a network of computers, never downloaded files over modems in my life and having but the slightest ideas as to what UNIX could be?