Anybody who reads my journal knows that I am drawn more to enigma than to absolutism and disambiguation.  What can I say...  I’m intrigued by the bark on trees. Lately, I’ve been revisiting the writings of Paul Tillich. I stumbled on his writing at a time when I thought it would be a good idea to firm up some of my fuzzy thinking about religion. Stumbled is the appropriate word.  Reading Tillich, I could barely get from one sentence to the next without the help of a dictionary, but I knew I was meeting a kindred spirit. I began with one of his books and some of his lectures and essays and found in them a celebration of indefiniteness, of not deciding, of existential comfort in not knowing for sure.  

It was in late 1953, the year I graduated from high school and enrolled in college. I met Tillich in his book The Courage to Be  (published in 1952) after reading and discussing Hamlet with a very special teacher.  I had the unusual experience of being the only person to show up for a Shakespeare class at the beginning of the second semester. There were three or four sections of the course, and the one in which I was enrolled was scheduled for late in the afternoon. I expected to be told that I’d have to join one of the other groups, but that didn’t happen.  The professor said he’d like to keep the schedule if I was willing to do it.  He said someone else might join us, but nobody did.   We met twice a week in his office.  He had two rocking chairs.  He sat in one and I sat in the other. We read plays and sonnets; we listened to recordings... and we talked. When we read Hamlet, he introduced me to Tillich; and the experience was life-shaping.  I had been fortunate to have a couple of extraordinary teachers in high school; but Professor Malloy showed me that being a student is one thing and being a scholar is something else.  He was the teacher and I was the student.  By mid-semester he said we were both scholars, and I understood that it was true.

We read Hamlet... together.... aloud.  He read some of the parts and I read some. When we got to Hamlet’s soliloquy, he read it first... all the way through, and I listened; and before going on, he asked me to read it.  And then we talked, and in the discussion he told me about Paul Tillich’s experience in the German army in World War One and his later troubles with Hitler, about his coming to the U.S.   He gave me The Courage to Be, which he had just finished reading. He said Tillich’s thesis had changed forever the way he would read and understand Hamlet’s soliloquy.  He confided that “to be or not to be” was his dilemma, too. It became mine, as well.  From then on I knew I didn’t want to live my life in a state of nonbeing.