We classify a first, a second, or a third. Those who get thirds will teach mathematics. So you have a self-reproducing cycle of vengeful mediocrity in the most crucial moments, that of the child. But it can be solved. The Stalinist solution worked, and for many years. Russian primary and secondary school training in mathematics, sciences, and languages was the best in the world. It honoured the teacher, making it the most rewarding and not the most punishing of careers. This does not mean for a moment that we will not continue to love literature – that we will not continue in a few of our cases to try and learn it by heart, a little bit every day, a little bit every morning. And I can tell you that trying to learn prose by heart is hell. I know people that can do it very beautifully, but it’s very, very difficult. You have to hear the music in the prose, you have to let your memory pick up the syncopation, and even then it is difficult– but do try, even if you fail.

Know that Heidegger is both right and totally wrong when he says, “The sciences only have answers, the arts, only questions.” It’s both right and wrong. It is a wonderfully provocative challenge. The questions posed to us by great literature are indeed the recurrent ones, but to persist in asking them without the scruple of awareness of what is happening to our intellectual world is, I think, a blind arrogance for which we are already paying a very high price. God knows, statistics must not be taken verbatim. Nevertheless when UNESCO, in last year’s survey of education, claims that some eighty-two percent of those at the highest end of the curve of intelligence are now in the sciences, that’s something to think about.

There are bridges. There are efforts to be undertaken. Above all, there are joys, enormous joys to experience. Do honour to your students. I had the incredible luck to be at the University of Chicago with Hutchins one day, and Hutchins had a rule that even freshmen were allowed to sit against the wall in a graduate seminar on the condition that they didn’t open their mouths. I had heard that Leo Strauss had announced a seminar, “Plato and the Polis.” I sat against a wall, and this little, formidable man walked in and said, I have never forgotten a single second of that moment, "In this seminar, the name of who was incomparable will not be mentioned." I didn’t catch the name. I was nervous, and I went up to a graduate student afterward, and I said, "Look, can you help me?" He said, "I will write it down for you." Martin Heidegger. So I rushed to the library on the Midway and got out Sein und Zeit. I couldn’t understand the first sentence; I was totally helpless. And I kept trying and trying. I kept it open in front of me, and I felt, not defeated, not mocked, not condescended to, but infinitely honoured by the provocation.