Mr. Botimer’s confession

Mr. Botimer took the chalk and wrote a name on the blackboard in huge letters. While most of his contemporaries preferred whiteboards and markers, if you looked in the dictionary under ‘old school’ you’d be disappointed as they are two separate words and therefore not defined in that particular tome.

The effort of writing TOLSTOY in huge letters had already started his forehead off and glistening. His tweed jacket did not help matters. His students were still unsure if his jet black hair was greasy or it was just the jet blackness of it that made it appear so.

“Bonus points to the student who can tell me who observed that the only truly serious philosophical question one must ask oneself is whether or not to commit suicide” he began.

He stared out into a sea of blank faces.

“Camus. Albert Camus.” His students stared back at a puddle of a disappointed face.

He took a moment to momentarily remove his thick black glasses and wipe his brow before continuing.

He replaced his thick black glasses and continued.

“Leo Tolstoy wrote extensively about his suicidal thoughts. His search for meaning. ‘I did not myself know what I wanted. I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it. But when I began to search for the meaning of life, when I began to feel the need to live, this mirror became either torment­ing or unnecessary, superfluous and ludicrous.’ ”

He began to walk back and forth in front of the room, looking up at the ceiling as if for inspiration.

“Then ol’ Leo had a dream. A dream that by all accounts saved him. And that’s what I want to discuss today. What I want to dissect… and I’m hoping you’ll join me.” He paused for effect.

The pause had little to no effect. Actually, no effect to absolutely no effect.

“You see, in this dream he hung by rope over an abyss. And when he looked up he saw the rope disappearing into the infinite. The unknowable. My question to you is… how could he tell the abyss from the unknowable?”

The students in his class rushed to be the first to appear completely disinterested.

“Anyone?”

No one.

This might have rattled a lesser teacher, but Mr. Botimer was made of sterner stuff.

“I’ve wrestled with that question quite a bit lately. The dream has been analyzed by all of the top literary critics, philosophers and psychologists, but nobody has asked that particular question. The only answer I can come up with is gravity.”

He said the last word with a sense of… well… gravity. He waited to see his students light up at the implications of such a double entendre. He lifted his eyebrows.

They remained dark.

The bottom of a coalmine at midnight dark.

Both his students and his eyebrows.

“Take away gravity and he was no longer hanging. He was just suspended in space.” Again his eyebrows made their quiet plea.

For a moment he thought that the slightly chubby girl in the third row was connecting the dots of hanging, rope, and suicide, but instead she just had something in her eye and quickly returned to her previous catatonic state.

“Gravity introduces the idea of science, i.e. reality, into the equation…”

As soon as he said the word ‘equation’ his students stirred. Pencils stood at attention.

You see, Mr. Botimer was a math teacher.