Without a Name, Without a Face

A Teacher Remains by Being Forgotten

Some years ago I wrote down what a true master is. There are people in this world who, unrecognized by others, their abilities unacknowledged, at times slighted and unjustly treated, still go quietly on finding and fulfilling their calling. Recalling such people I have met in my life, I set down four things they had in common.

They do not think they know everything, and so they are always trying to learn. They look at people, not at organizations. They keep saying what they are grateful for, and keep being grateful. They keep trying to share with others whatever they have discovered or come to know.— 2022, Facebook

Having written the four down, I stared at them a long while and realized they were all saying one thing in different ways. All four are the portrait of someone who does not put himself forward. Not claiming to know everything, he learns; looking at people rather than organizations, he does not chase power; being grateful, he does not claim the credit; sharing what he knows, he does not hoard. A master is not someone who looks large but someone who no longer needs to make himself large.

I closed that post this way. If you read this and wonder whether I wrote it about you — yes, it is about you. Don’t give up. Just hold on. Better days are coming soon. I thought at the time I was writing it in passing, but this chapter is, in the end, addressed to those people.

About twenty years ago, on the flight home to Korea after my time in Boston, I read a book a younger colleague had given me: Tuesdays with Morrie. An old professor dying of illness tells his students at the first class that although he had taught social psychology for twenty years, this time he must warn them that taking the course involves a risk — because he is fatally ill and may die before the term ends, so if that worries them they may switch to another course.

A teacher wrote his own death into the syllabus. I think that is the very last form of the opening of a wound described in Chapter Twelve. On that plane, in tears, I made a vow: I would become a true teacher.

Then ten years passed, and when I opened that book again I wrote this.

What kind of teacher have I been these ten years? What is a good teacher? Surely not a popular one. A professor who lectures well? Is lecturing well enough to make a good professor? A professor who does good research? For whom, and for what, was that research?— 2014, Facebook

In those ten years I built many courses and taught many students. I scolded some until they wept, and I wept myself in front of students, overcome by my own feeling. I gave wounds and received them. And if asked now what the answer of those ten years was, I would say it was neither the lecturing nor the research.

A teacher’s goal is to become unnecessary to the student.

A bridge is not remembered by the one who crossed it. Whoever reaches the far side walks on looking ahead; he does not turn back to thank the bridge. And yet without the bridge no one crosses. Being forgotten is not the bridge’s failure but its completion.

At the university I have commuted to for more than twenty years there is one example of that completion: the ground where the College of Human Ecology and the College of Science stand. Thousands pass in front of those buildings every day, and not many know what happened on that land.

It was March 17, 1949. Some twenty faculty wives had gathered in one house and were talking together. The doorbell rang, and a young man insisted on entering the room. While they scuffled at the entrance, another came in by the back door and shot her from behind. The one shot was Ethel Van Wagoner Underwood, daughter-in-law of the Underwood family that founded Yonsei University and wife of Dr. Horace H. Underwood. She died on the way to hospital. And the young men who fired were students of that school.

He had given his whole life to raising students, and a student killed his wife. I cannot even guess what that heart was like. And yet Dr. Underwood forgave them after they were sentenced to death. He came forward in the campaign to spare the lives of his wife’s killers, urging that there be no excessive or coercive interrogation. When war came he went alone to Busan as a refugee, working to prepare a wartime campus and to move an orphanage to Jeju Island, and there he died of a heart attack.

The story does not end there. His son, Dr. Horace G. Underwood, donated to the university the house where his mother had been shot along with some thirty-three thousand square meters of surrounding land. On that land the present buildings stand. After his death in 2004 the family transferred every remaining right of ownership to the school and returned to the United States.

Every time I pass those buildings I think: the students studying inside do not know this story. And that is right. A bridge makes the crossing possible by being forgotten. What that family left was not a name but land, and what stands on the land is not their monument but other people’s classrooms.

In Chapter One we separated swelling from growing. Now that distinction can be stated one last time. Swelling is enlarging a name; growing is making something that remains when the name is erased. The expanded person fears that his name will disappear; the mature person builds what will remain after his name disappears. Titling this chapter “Without a Name, Without a Face” is not a rhetorical show of humility. It is the conclusion of an argument prepared since Chapter One.

In English the word bless shares a root with an old word for blood. The root of happiness, by contrast, is hap, meaning chance. Happiness is what happens to me; blessing comes from blood someone shed. The place where my own bleeding becomes another’s blessing is the last place the person standing at the boundary stands.

Over the place where you are standing now — who is walking across?

Notes for this chapter

Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie · Records concerning Ethel Van Wagoner Underwood (1949) and Dr. Horace H. Underwood and Dr. Horace G. Underwood · The etymologies of bless and happiness