John Lachs
He retired at 87, sooner than he wanted. But he's still professing, and his legacy will endure.
I went to see my old teacher and friend John Lachs in the hospital at Vanderbilt yesterday.
I described myself to his nurse as one of John’s more improbable reclamation projects. It’s a project that commenced the moment I met him back in 1980, when I entered grad school in the Philosophy program at Vanderbilt. I don’t think it’s completed yet.
One day back in the early ‘90s I arranged a lunch date with John, during my mid-day break from work at the old Davis-Kidd bookstore on Hillsboro Pike in Nashville. I wanted to inform him explicitly and in person of what he must already have intuited from my prolonged quiescence: I had no intention or expectation of ever finishing the doctoral dissertation I’d started with him years earlier. Sorry to have wasted your time.
The daunting project of drafting hundreds of philosophically-coherent and relevant pages of “original” thought on a topic about which he and my other faculty committee members (Hodges, Compton, Post, Dokecki) possessed vast expertise just felt like an impossibly larger hurdle than I could imagine ever clearing.
And anyway, I said, I liked being a bookseller (and co-night manager of the Vandy student center). I’d gotten pretty good at reading lots of other people’s writing, and telling strangers what to read. Plus, that staff discount. And I got to coach the Bad News company softball team. We were consistent losers in a league of over-serious beer leaguers, but we still had fun socializing at Dalt’s after every Tuesday night debacle.
Fine, John said. Never one to browbeat or meddle or restrict his students’ freedom, he just said to let him know when I changed my mind. And he picked up the check for lunch.
More years quickly passed. I married. I didn’t exactly change my mind, mostly my spouse changed it for me. You’ll always regret not at least trying, she said. I did try, I said. Try better, she said.
So I screwed my courage to the sticking place, as the Bard put it, and called John.
Let’s do it, he said.
Not many profs of my acquaintance, then or now, would have waited on me so long.
How to do it? Get up every morning, John said, and start writing whatever’s in your head. Don’t even wait for the coffee to drip, just get something out. Don’t worry if you think it’s no good. Fix it later. And whatever you’ve accumulated by Friday each week, send it on.
And so I did, week after week. With John’s help (and Older Daughter’s indispensable habit in infancy of sleeping soundly ‘til 7 or so) I started getting up at 5 a.m. and spilling out whatever I could manage). I guess we fixed it well enough.
By the end, John Compton was complaining that it was too damn long. Never saw that criticism (which I secretly cherished) coming. The resulting dissertation was called, ironically I now realize, “Beyond Words” (I forget the forgettable subtitle, I’ll look for it on the shelf next time I’m in the Vandy library).
The subsequent book based on it was William James’s “Springs of Delight”: the Return to Life. That subtitle is far more memorable, at least to me, because John went to bat for it when the publisher wanted to drop it. It was important to me to retain it though, because John’s patience and confidence did in fact return me to the life of teaching and learning. And (as I wrote in the preface), John’s “deft but unobtrusive direction” showed me that I can tackle big projects. That’s an invaluable life lesson I’m still applying and always will. “He personifies teaching’s ideal.”
John went to bat for me many times, got me hired at three other schools before I landed finally and securely at Middle Tennessee. When the provost at one of them, Belmont in Nashville, rescinded my hire because I’d indicated a favorable opinion of the Unitarian religious tradition, John went to bat for me once again.
What an apt baseball metaphor. Yesterday John asked me if I was still infatuated with the game. We talked about the importance of players harmonizing together to sponsor team success (noting that my Cardinals, despite a surfeit of stars, have been a horrid team this season). As John has written, only communities of individuals can be expected to flourish.
Well, as we saw last October when so many of John’s old students and friends convened at Vandy to celebrate his stellar career, his tutelage has created an expansive and far-flung community of scholars and lifelong learners committed to loving life and insisting on the relevance of philosophy thereto (insisting correlatively that philosophy make and keep itself relevant to a life worth loving).
And for all that, as I said to John yesterday: thank you. You’ve given so much for so long to so many. You’ve more than earned your retirement.
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Postscript, November 14 2023. John died this afternoon. What a remarkable, generous, kind, brilliant, inspirational, humane, human legacy. He’ll always be with me, and with so many of us.