Above him and below, three stories of the apartment building, like it or not, had to listen to Frescobaldi, Corelli, Pergolesi, to the "Italian Maiden in Algiers." When neighbors knocked to complain, he smiled and said that without music you couldn't swallow what life offered, and that it would do them good to submit and listen. But he promised to have more insulation blown in between the floors, and indeed he did bring in a soundproofing engineer. "I spent ten thousand on kapok insulation and still the rooms are not _insonoriseйs__." But when the neighbors were listed for him one by one there wasn't a single tenant he was able to care about. He annotated his reasons and was prepared to explain his grounds. He had a line on each of the neighbors-little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads, each one a shrine of _amour propre__, scheming to persuade everyone else to endorse his image of himself; flat, reckoning personalities (a better term than "souls"-you could deal with personalities but to contemplate the souls of such individuals was a horror you wanted to avoid). Nothing to live for but foolishness, vain glory-no loyalty to your community, no love for your _polis__, devoid of gratitude, with nothing you would lay down your life for. Because, remember, the great passions are antinomian. And the great figures of human heroism looming tremendously over us are very different from the man in the street, our "normal" commonplace contemporary. Ravelstein's appraisal of the people he dealt with daily had this background of great love or of boundless rage. He would remind me that "rage" was in the first line of the _Iliad-menin Achileos__. Here you see the main, bearing beams of Ravelstein's deeply honest belief. The greatest heroes of all, the philosophers, had been and always would be atheists. After the philosophers, in Ravelstein's procession, came poets and statesmen. The tremendous historians like Thucydides. The military geniuses like Caesar-"the greatest man who ever lived within the tides of time"-and, next to Caesar, Marc Antony, briefly his successor, "the triple pillar of the earth" who valued love above imperial politics. Ravelstein went for classical antiquity. He preferred Athens but he respected Jerusalem greatly.
These were some of his fundamental assumptions, and the foundations of his teacher's vocation. If these are left out of my account of his life we'll see only his eccentricities or foibles, his lavish, screwy purchases, his furnishings, his vanities, his gags, his laugh-paroxysms, the _marche militaire__ he did as he crossed the quadrangle in his huge fur-lined coat of luxurious leather-I knew only one other such coat. Gus Alex, a hit man and a hoodlum, wore a long, beautifully tailored mink coat on Lake Shore Drive where he lived and where he walked his little dog.
It used to be said now and then that his favorite students got a "charge" out of Ravelstein-that he was funny, a hoot. The charge, however, was only superficially funny or entertaining-a vital force was transmitted. Whatever the oddities were, they fed his energy, and this energy was spread, disseminated, bestowed.
I am doing what I can with the facts. He lived by his ideas. His knowledge was real, and he could document it, chapter and verse. He was here to give aid, to clarify and _move__, and to make certain if he could that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate in bourgeois well-being, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein's life. He did not accept dullness and boredom. Nor was depression tolerated. He did not put up with low moods. Troubles when he had them were physical. His dental problems at one time were severe. He was persuaded at the university clinic to have implants put in; these went through the gums into the sockets, into the bone of the jaw. This operation was bungled and he suffered agonies at the hands of the surgeon. He walked the floors all night. Then he tried to get the implanted posts pulled out, and this was even more painful than the driving in.
"This is what comes of taking a cabinet maker's approach to the human head," he told me.
"You should have gone to Boston for this. Boston oral surgeons are supposed to be the best."
"Never put yourself in the hands of any lousy specialists. You'll be sacrificed on the altar of their thee-ah _technics__."
He was impatient with hygiene. There was no counting the cigarettes he lit in a day. Most of them he forgot, or broke. They lay like sticks of chalk in his CEO glass ashtrays. But then the organism was imperfect. His biological patchiness was a given-faulty, darkened heart and lungs. But to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein's aims. Risk, limit, death's blackout were present in every living moment. When he coughed you heard the sump at the bottom of a mine shaft echoing.
I stopped asking Abe about the implants in his jawbone. I assumed that there were pangs now and then, and I thought of them as part of the psychophysical background.
Irregular in his habits and his hours, he seldom had a full night's sleep. Class preparation often kept him up. To lead his Oklahoma, Texas, or Oregon students through a Platonic dialogue, you needed exceptional skills as well as esoteric knowledge. Abe was not a late riser. Nikki on the other hand watched Chinese kung fu thrillers all night long and often slept until 2 p.m. Both Abe and Nikki were basketball fans. They seldom missed the Chicago Bulls on NBC.
When an important game was played, Ravelstein invited his graduate students to his apartment. He ordered pizza. Two delivery boys, carrying stacks of boxes, kicked at his door. The entry hall was filled with the hot smells of oregano, tomatoes, toasted cheese, pepperoni, and anchovies. Nikki presided over the cutting, using a sharp rolling blade. Slices were handed out on paper plates. Rosamund and I ate sandwiches made by Ravelstein with eager, un steady hands and cheerful shouts. There was something like a demonstration of extraordinary skill in the serving of the drinks, as though he had halted in the middle of a high wire with a tray of overfilled glasses. You didn't want to banter with him then.
The portable phone was usually sticking out of Abe's pocket. I can't remember what call he was expecting just then. Maybe one of his sources had inside information about President Bush's final decision to end the war in Iraq. I have an impression somehow of the President-long-faced, lean, and tall-intermittently interrupting the pregame action on the basketball court. Vast banks of spectators, full of light, all brilliantly colored, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant filling the net with warm-up shots. Mr. Bush equally tall but without beauty in his movements. It may not have been Iraq at all, but another crisis. You know how television is: you can't tell the wars from the NBA events-sports, superpower glamour, high-tech military operations; this was keenly felt by Ravelstein. If he spoke of Machiavelli and the best way to deal with a defeated enemy it was because he was a teacher through and through. There were flashes also of General Colin Powell and of Baker, the Secretary of State. And then in the stadium the brief dimming of the vast lights-and after that the dramatic return of full illumination.