A Long Way to Shiloh Read Free Page B

this, I thought, watching the tablets spit and bob and writhe.
    The unseemly behemoth had not been wrong last night. There were indeed two types in my discipline. The whizz-kids had to watch out. The thing comes and goes, in flashes. It had flashed first at Jericho, with Kathleen Kenyon, which had started the notoriety; again at Megiddo. It isn’t a matter of learning, although you need that, too, a prodigious amount of it, libraries full of it, enormous atom-smashing assemblies of it, to open the withered shell and in the withered fruit to see the living orchard. More, much more; and at the same time ridiculously less: the sudden moment of rapport , across the millennia , between you and him , who had written the thing that had been found; the flickering in the imagination, the metaphysical twilight in which, without formal process of thought, a relation is made between the found object that had been lost, and its lost user now, in this revelatory moment, found.
    Something to do with the boutons, of course, those nodes of association in the brain; and there was no telling about them. Either they lit up or they didn’t; erratic wiring. When it happened , as the cow had rightly said, it happened early. It behoved one to try and keep it happening. How?
    Fortunate Michael Ventris, who had deciphered Linear B at twenty-eight, and died at thirty. At thirty, I was taking up a university chair.
    A ragged spume-like precipitate had gathered at the top of the glass. I shook it to make it settle and drew my dressing gown more closely. I was seated on the toilet in the arctic chill of the bathroom.
    Further clouds of disaffection had come to trouble my pillow in the night and they gathered round the toilet this morning. Was I or was I not in tune with this education kick at all? It was a question, a big and untimely one. To be a good educationist one had to have, presumably, an urge of some kind. One had to want to tell somebody something; preferably everybody everything. I had no urge of this kind. My urge was of quite another kind. If I learned something, my reaction was to keep quiet about it. If I uncovered something, my reaction was to put it back, exactly as it was.
    It was an initial reaction, of course, and was followed by others. Perhaps, in some obscure quest for grace, I even over-compensated ; thus calling into being what the female minotaur had described as my ‘racy and amusing exposition’. But the initial urge was there. It was not an educational one.
    Not that, I thought, moving numbly and with a sense of disturbance on the plastic seat, I was a bad educationist. They’d offered me, after all, a chair . This undoubtedly was something. My lectures always drew an appreciative hand, the classes were well attended. Too well attended. Since the frigging young Arab had failed to keep his frigging fingers off the Isaiah scroll at Qumran, everyone wanted to get in the act. I had incipient priests, advertising agents, debutantes; budding social pests of all kinds. What had the obliquities of Talmud, Mishnah, Targum and Zohar to do with them? Why should they want to know about the way of life illustrated by the Damascene and Alexandrian texts? In what possible ways could the ancient anguish, business and religious, of the peoples who had used the Akkadian, Syriac, Ugaritic, Hebrew and Aramaic tongues, enrich them? And if it did, should it be allowed to? The thing was an affront, and could become a public mischief. Already a literature of upwards of two thousand volumes had been called into being by the grotesque flowering of interest in scrollery. There was even a Home University Teach Yourself the Dead Sea Scrolls!
    Far too much knowledge was going here, and undoubtedly it would get worse. The summons to the University of Bedfordshire was only a further indication of it. Develop an expert interest in any specialized branch of the academic syllabus and inevitably you found yourself in some pedagogic posture, instructing