The Absent Minded Processor

When I first started working as a monastic assistant at St. Martin's, I thought I might have finally found something that I physically could not do because of my aging body. The preparation of each meal wasn't a problem: cleanup, however, with the toting back and forth of dishes, ice and a zillion other things needed for a decent meal, was a physical challenge. It turned out that I just was out of condition, so I was planning to keep the job.

As I continued the student side of my life, though, the mental part of my life was losing its capacity to absorb information. I could understand the plays, like Antigone, Dr. Faustus, and St. Joan. I could write the summaries and understand the intricacies of the proprietary Web sites used by the professors to assign and submit ENG 102 homework. I could even keep up with the MATH 110 homework, although the break point in algebra frequently doesn't show up until about the fifth week of classes, judging from my previous experience. However, comprehending anything said by Alasdair MacIntyre in "After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory" was totally beyond me.

I know that some professors have low opinions of the intellectual capacity of some of their students, so I buckled down and spent every spare moment reading the assigned materials for PHIL 301. I thought about ethics on my commute. I looked up vocabulary words in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy and tried to think up sentences in which I could use "interminability of moral discourse" and "elenchus." I even called a friend who has a degree in philosophy, who found my struggles amusing.

It took another friend, as well as a counselor in the SMU Learning Center, to point out that I'm trying to learn another language. Philosophy uses a lot more Greek than medical research, hospital marketing or local and international news, the areas that I've been writing about most of my life. Philosophers also use some English constructions that can cause migraines in unsuspecting passersby. The counselor nailed the actual cause of my difficulties: despite my best efforts at exercise, nutrition and all the rest, my brain, and thus my learning style are aging. It is just going to take more time for me to learn this stuff. Plus a tutor who has already taken the class and, I pray, passed.

So, we added up my class hours, added twice that number to account for the homework I should be doing for each class, and then doubled the homework hours that should be devoted to ethics. Once we added on the hours I was working in food service, I was running out of time to actually drive to school.

So, I'm not quitting the job feeding the monks because of the physical challenge, but because my brain needs more time to spend with Plato, MacIntyre and the other guys. They're not as much fun as the monks, at least at this stage, but there's hope that someday they might be. After all, my friend the philosopher seems to find introductory ethics hilarious.