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Show Acting Alone Page 333 on and spend a few days at the real place, the real fountain of young talent in these parts, their sister institution, the University of Kansas. He was immediately referred to an older gentleman with Moses' own white marble beard. Elder Cicerone glanced at that beard from afar and reflexly typecast the old pedagogue, dismissed him as just another walking caricature of the American intellectual outsider, too wrapped up in rarefied books to have any sense of his own presentation-self. It is, after all, quite possible for any man who has aged with true grace to exude a sufficiently foreboding charisma of God-the-Fatherly sagacity, without his having to revert to pre-civilized habits of personal hygiene. All one has to do is to look at the Council of the Twelve, in particular good Councillor Ezra, to see some redoubtable and mighty old gentlemen, cleanshaven to an individual. But, up close, looking into this old professor's sharpened eyes, hearing his serene voice, Elder Cicerone knew he was not so easily dismissed. In the professor's presence the Elder was suddenly visited by doubts such as never before since he was a lad. Could it be possible that this fine, canny old Hebrew was shrewd enough to affect that long white beard deliberately to cause his students, the drying-out "Love Generation," to fear him as wise and to leave him respectfully alone that he might scribble his major-minor poetry and edit his socialist magazine and confer with peripatetic literary agents in peace during office hours, when his door was contractually supposed to be "always open"? This professor was good, and he was mighty, and he seemed to have all the time in the world to entertain the Elder. Maybe the Double-Pronged Earthly and |
