I had a professor in college who claimed to know Samuel Beckett personally and told stories about him staring out of his classroom window, unsure of what to say to his charges. My professor said Beckett feared that he had nothing to teach, or that if he did, it would ultimately come to little more than language itself....

I sometimes wonder, in fact, if we might not both be better off, my students and I, if we spent a semester in silence thinking collectively on a subject and only rising to speak when the spirit moved us, Quaker style.

-in The Mediocre Professor

[via sweatervestboy]