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held against my breast!
    He has told them to read ‘Lara’. His notes deal with ‘Lara’. There is no way in which he can evade the poem. He reads aloud:
    He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
    An erring spirit from another hurled;
    A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
    By choice the perils he by chance escaped.
    â€˜Who will gloss these lines for me? Who is this “erring spirit”? Why does he call himself “a thing”? From what world does he come?’
    He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday. So he does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark. But today he is met with silence, a dogged silence that organizes itself palpably around the stranger in their midst. They will not speak, they will not play his game, as long as a stranger is there to listen and judge and mock.
    â€˜Lucifer,’ he says. ‘The angel hurled out of heaven. Of how angels live we know little, but we can assume they do not require oxygen. At home Lucifer, the dark angel, does not need to breathe. All of a sudden he finds himself cast out into this strange “breathing world” of ours. “Erring”: a being who chooses his own path, who lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself. Let us read further.’
    The boy has not looked down once at the text. Instead, with a little smile on his lips, a smile in which there is, just possibly, a touch of bemusement, he takes in his words.
    He could
    At times resign his own for others’ good,
    But not in pity, not because he ought,
    But in some strange perversity of thought,
    That swayed him onward with a secret pride
    To do what few or none would do beside;
    And this same impulse would in tempting time
    Mislead his spirit equally to crime.
    â€˜So, what kind of creature is this Lucifer?’
    By now the students must surely feel the current running between them, between himself and the boy. It is to the boy alone that the question has addressed itself; and, like a sleeper summoned to life, the boy responds. ‘He does what he feels like. He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad. He just does it.’
    â€˜Exactly. Good or bad, he just does it. He doesn’t act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him. Read a few lines further: “His madness was not of the head, but heart.” A mad heart. What is a mad heart?’
    He is asking too much. The boy would like to press his intuition further, he can see that. He wants to show that he knows about more than just motorcycles and flashy clothes. And perhaps he does. Perhaps he does indeed have intimations of what it is to have a mad heart. But, here, in this classroom, before these strangers, the words will not come. He shakes his head.
    â€˜Never mind. Note that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is something constitutionally wrong. On the contrary, we are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing , that is, a monster. Finally, Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him, not in the deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to solitude.’
    Heads bent, they scribble down his words. Byron, Lucifer, Cain, it is all the same to them.
    They finish the poem. He assigns the first cantos of Don Juan and ends the class early. Across their heads he calls to her: ‘Melanie, can I have a word with you?’
    Pinch-faced, exhausted, she stands before him. Again his heart goes out to her. If they were alone he would embrace her, try to cheer her up. My little