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  • The Paris Review

    Learning Curve

    by Curtis Gillespie Jul 23, 2019 16 minutes

    Curtis Gillespie on how a formative relationship with one of his professors grew increasingly complicated. 


    I met Ronald Hamowy in the winter of 1984 when I took a course he was teaching at the University of Alberta called European Intellectual History. I didn’t know what intellectual history was and had never been to or cared much about Europe, but a friend recommended the course, so I signed up.

    There were about twelve of us waiting around a seminar table the first day. Professor Hamowy was late and I chatted with some of the other students—Dusten, Steve, Pierre. Those three, who are still friends of mine, had taken other classes with The Hamster, as Pierre called him, and I was about to ask Pierre why he called him that when the door opened and Hamowy came in. I will forever recall the surprise of first seeing him. He was about four feet tall and tubby, in a dark blazer and Buddy Holly glasses. He walked to the table and hopped up to seat himself. After handing out a reading list and warning us not to expect a good mark, he canceled the rest of the class.

    Pierre, Dusten, and Steve were going for coffee and said I should join them. I assumed it would be the four of us, but Hamowy gave us his coffee order and a five-dollar bill. When we got back to his office, I was overwhelmed by the thousands of books on his shelves and asked him if he’d actually read them all. He looked at me. I felt my ears get hot. A decent grade was unlikely to begin with, and now I’d insulted the prof.

    “Are you out of your mind?” said Hamowy. “Who would ever want to read all these books?”

    We laughed and a feeling of freedom went through me. I didn’t know you were allowed to laugh at learning. And I could see all over Hamowy’s round face how much he enjoyed making people laugh. He took his glasses off and wiped them, still chuckling. The other three were grinning at me, as if to say, Yeah, we can’t believe it, either.

    *

    The reading list Hamowy had handed out was bewildering. The only link between the books, as far as I could tell, was that the authors were European. There was philosophy, literature, social theory, economics—though not a lot that looked like history. Hamowy started us off with passages from Sartre and Camus, but in class the following week he talked mostly about the playboy lifestyles of the Parisian existentialists.

    “Anyway,” he said near the end of class. “You only need to remember one thing. Camus was

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