OCR Text |
Show -197- That this was not wholly true, he knew from the newspapers, where accounts of student demonstrations in the East and the South were daily recorded. Now, here, in this place and this time, it was only with a great effort that he could bring him- •fo selfAconsider replying to these requests, let along muster the energy to do so. Yet at those other places where the letters had had their origins, there seemed to be no hint of ax-jareness that anything had changed. The Professor had to xronder about himself. For the first time, he thought he understood the meaning of the students' term, "relevance." The matter of these letters, which at another time would have seemed to him of great importance, now seemed to him irelevant. Was this really so? Or was he suf-fering from a failure of nerve? Was he immobilized by being caught between opposing positions, neither of which he could bring himself wholly to accept? With the threat of a strike, he could not imagine himself calmly accepting an offer to write a paper on one of the contemporary authors that had been suggested to him.. He could not even get on with his present work, which did not seem to him "irrelevant." Yet when he thought about the three Chicano students he had met in the hallway at the church, grimly playing the role of liborators, he vias moved to the same kind of emotions with which he sometimes responded to a badly done T.V. drama. He was interrupted in these unpleasant thoughts by an |