Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didn't. Her expectations were high—impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.
When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: "Flawless." This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth course, I had heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn't get very far. The first person I told was my mother.
My mother is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset by my hubris(得意忘形)or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event,my mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I am sure she thought she was teaching me about transitions(过渡), structure, style and voice. But what I learned was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.
Creative criticism implies something about who is able to give it, who knows you well enough to show you how your mental life is getting in the way of good writing. They are also the people who care enough to see you through this painful realization. ①
I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me." It is a thing of no great difficulty," according to Plutarch, "to raise objections against another man's speech, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome." Perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something a bit closer to Marcus Cicero's claim that one should" criticize by creation, not by finding fault." Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on his own terms—a process that is often extremely painful, but also almost always meaningful.
② My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism is not meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any—the type I could have found on my own—I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was" flawless", she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. ③
She criticized me when I included little-known references and professional jargon(行话). She had no patience for brilliant but irrelevant figures of speech. Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. ④ But perhaps I missed something important in my mother's lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworked "Song of Myself" between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson I took from my mother: If perfection were possible, it would not be motivating.
