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| Jim Downie (right) at Gethsemani Abbey from the summer 2017 St. Xavier alumni magazine |
He wasn't one of those teachers who was a wide favorite, but Mr. Downie was without a doubt my favorite teacher from my four years at St. Xavier. A confirmed bachelor, he would spend his summers travelling the world; one time he brought in a tray of relics from the Middle East.
He was very dry but sometimes slyly funny. Every now and then he would drop a witticism into his lectures. (He was the kind of teacher, though, where one suspected he had penned the joke into the margins of his lecture notes years ago, and told the same joke at the same point every year.) He was good-- for this sixteen-year-old at least-- at bringing the themes and potentials of literature to life. I had him for British literature, where we made it from Beowulf up to the middle of the twentieth century; it was in his class that I first read Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a novel I went on to teach myself.
We used to chat about NPR, as both of us listened to WGUC, Cincinnati's classical music station, on our drive into school in the morning. For a while, there was this surreal thing going where one day in class he would mention a classical piece (like Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," during a lecture on And Quiet Flows the Don) and then the next morning I would hear it on WGUC, like he was tied directly into the classical music zeitgeist.
As seniors, we had lots of options for English; you needed a full year of it, but could pick between a number of one-semester courses. I actually took a full year of AP Lit, a semester of creative writing, and a semester of European literature, the latter with Mr. Downie. Mr. Downie had an appreciation of the dark and the depressing; we read Candide and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Joyce in that class, and he was good at bringing out the despair in these stories cued to the end of class. "And so human life is meaningless: all you have at the end of it is the grave," he would say, and the bell would ring.
It was in one of those moment, I think, where it flashed across my mind, This is what I want to be doing.
I don't think I'm quite him as a teacher, but I often think about him. He was a good teacher, not just in his ability to explicate the literature, but also in his ability to apply the literature to life. Perhaps naïvely (one of my colleagues just gave a lecture where he called this middlebrow populism or something), I think literature can teach us how to live our lives, and I think at least partially this derives from how Jim Downie taught.
One of my favorite assignments during European literature is that he had all of us look up the etymology of our names to verify our origins. It was from this that I learned möll was a German root related to "mill," and thus that one of my ancestors must have been a mill-man, i.e., a miller. After we did this, he met with each of us individually to help us pick a book from our country of origin that he thought we would like. It was thanks to this that I read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, which for some time I went around trumpeting as my favorite book. Perhaps it still would be, but I haven't read it in thirteen years!
I began my academic career as a language arts education major, though I ended up teaching college, not high school. It was thanks to his example that I wanted to. Probably many teachers have such a story, but Mr. Downie is mine.
It's been a long time since I've seen him. At least twice during my college years; I remember stopping by St. X and telling him I was taking or had taken a Victorian literature class, and he asked if I had read any Thomas Hardy. All I'd read was some short fiction (it had been a summer class, so we'd hardly done any novels), and he bemoaned that I hadn't read The Mayor of Casterbridge. I picked it up next time I went to the used bookstore, and thus began a lifelong love.
Searching my old LiveJournal reveals that I bumped into him once after that, a week into my relationship with Hayley, when we went to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (He was a big fan, and my parents would bump into him a lot.) All I recorded in my LJ was that seeing him "was nice"; I wonder if he was disappointed that I'd decided to not be a high school English teacher after all.
This whole post was spurred by a question about role models, and it's perhaps odd, I've ended up writing not about a model for living, but a model for work, and there's so much of life that's not work. But it's not about work, it's about literature, and for me, literature is a wellspring for both work and for living. And a large part of how I view literature goes back to Jim Downie, and I hope I live up to his example in some small way.
#71: Who is your role model?
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