Too much loyalty often leads to the slavery of the body and mind.
Mwanandeke Kindembo
Half a century ago I was fortunate enough to get admitted to one of the top law schools in this country, where I received an outstanding education that prepared me well for the legal career that I was to pursue during the following four decades. The teaching methodology employed at my school was the same used in most American law schools: the so-called “Socratic method,” in which the legal rules or principles applicable to a given factual situation are not stated directly by the instructor but drawn out from the class by posing a series of questions to the students intended to refine their understanding of the matter and help them develop a form of logical thinking that is most appropriate when performing complex legal analyses.
One drawback of the Socratic method is that it can be misapplied by unskilled or sadistic teachers to elicit increasingly contradictory answers from the students to whom the questions are posed. First-year law students are most vulnerable to experiencing confusion and embarrassment when called upon to answer a barrage of leading questions; as a result, an atmosphere of repressed terror prevails in most freshman law classes.
A notable exception in my school was the Constitutional Law course taught by Professor Hal K. Hal had an even, measured voice and a friendly, non-confrontational manner that reduced tensions and put the students at ease, even when he mildly corrected them for a wrong answer. I was older than most of my classmates and felt less prone to experiencing in-class embarrassment, but all the same I was grateful for Hal’s gentle manner and often raised my hand when he asked for a volunteer to answer a given question. By the middle of the term, Hal and I had developed an easy camaraderie that translated into friendly chats during coffee breaks and, ultimately, frequent sharing of Szechuan food at lunches in a nearby eatery.
I discovered that Hal and I had similar political views, shared an interest in modern literature, and enjoyed Chinese food and Sci-Fi movies; but the most significant addiction we had in common was a love for classical music. He was a devotee of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, arguably the greatest composer of the “classical” period of music (mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries). His fondness for Mozart was such that his record collection included performances of virtually everything Mozart composed, as interpreted by both leading and obscure artists. He could talk at length about the merits and flaws of half a dozen different recordings of the same symphony, or evaluate the renditions of the same concerto by four or five pianists.
I am of course an admirer of Mozart’s works (I believe his clarinet concerto is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written), but my tastes are catholic: I enjoy a variety of operas, ballets, chamber and instrumental works, and all sorts of symphonic compositions, and cherish the works of most well-known composers from baroque Johann Sebastian Bach to contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. Owing to the difference between our musical tastes, I soon started a long-running exchange with Hal in which I tried to expand his musical horizons by lending him my recordings of music by other composers that “sounded like” Mozart (Haydn, early Beethoven, Rossini, Gluck, Boccherini, Hummel, Weber) and trying to move him beyond his fixation on Mozart. His response to my attempts was invariably along the lines “yes, this work is nice; it resembles Mozart somewhat, but why bother with something that sounds like Mozart, when you can listen to the real thing?”
I of course did not even attempt to stray into more drastically different composers like Brahms or Wagner or Dvorak; he would invariably respond, when one of those names was mentioned, “Oh, I listened to something by him once; it was not all that good.”
I became distressed when I realized that such an intelligent and sensitive person had such an incurable blind spot; it was not a matter of poor taste, or a choice that I could not understand or appreciate: if you had to have a mania, you could do much worse than being addicted to Mozart. What irritated me was that he could not be swayed from a very narrow viewpoint even when confronted with other obvious (at least to me) alternatives.
After a couple of months of trying I just gave up, and thereafter hardly ever discussed music with him.
My experience with Hal and music can be extrapolated to other areas of life. Can one succeed in rehabilitating a cult victim, a Led Zeppelin or Grateful Dead groupie, a member of a gang or an extreme political faction? I suspect that in most instances the answer is not.
This discouraging answer elicits a follow-up question: Does it matter? Hal’s addiction to Mozart was a private, benign disorder whose resolution was not urgent, and my unsuccessful attempt at conversion probably had no adverse consequences. At the other extreme, the adherents of a dangerous anti-social group or an extremist political faction must be curbed or, if necessary, subjected to legal sanctions, for they imperil the safety and well-being of the rest of us.
For most other situations, my view is that those who are victims of intellectual or behavioral oddities should be left alone as long as their aberrations pose no danger to themselves or others. I may have gone too far in my zealous attempt to draw Hal outside his comfort zone (although he did not exhibit any outward signs of resentment or discomfort), but no harm was apparently done. Hal continued to call on me during Constitutional Law classes and other courses I took under him, and was, as always, gentle and polite. But that, I now believe, was just my very good luck.
THE END
Bio:
Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over two hundred and ninety of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books, and podcasts. One of his four novels, an autobiography entitled “Cuban Transplant,” and four anthologies of his stories have also been published.