EOY2013

SIS 131
How Stories
Can Save Us
Professor John Ruff, Valparaiso University
The America fiction writer Tim O’Brien, in the last story of his brilliant collection of interconnected stories about a platoon
of American foot soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, claims “stories can save us.” Not our
bodies, O’Brien contends, but our souls. And I think he’s right in a number of ways. Here’s such a story. Once upon
a time a young man named Henry David Thoreau built himself a cottage at the edge of a pond, on land a mile or so out
of Concord, Massachusetts that belonged to his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. With a borrowed axe, with lumber
salvaged from an Irish railroad worker’s shanty, with the volunteer labor of famous friends, including Emerson and Bronson
Alcott, Thoreau fashioned for himself a place to read and think. While the rest of country put its shoulder to the massive
undertaking of development and Western expansion, digging canals, putting in railroads, building factories and forges,
Thoreau read, thought, took walks, filled his notebooks with news about the weather and the wildlife, grew beans and
baked his bread. The most famous fruit of his labor there was Walden, a book to which we can trace the origins of
environmental thinking in America--it is where ecocriticism begins, and where we find one of the shrewdest critiques of
American capitalism and consumer culture yet written.
In his journals, we learn that nothing he reads moves Thoreau more than certain ancient Indian classics he probably
borrowed from Emerson’s library, The Upanishads, The Vedas, The Law of Manu, The Dharma Shastras, and most of all,
The Bhagavad Gita. To students of American literature and culture, it can come as a something of a revelation, for some
it might border on heresy, to read that one of the prime architects of American individualism, American as apple pie in his
anti-authoritarianism and freedom of mind and expression, an American original if there ever was one, was in certain ways
an intellectual knockoff made in India. But it is a true, and there is evidence to support that claim all through out Walden.
And why does that matter? Well, consider how it might affect the way we read the writer of Essay on Civil Disobedience,
which Thoreau wrote to explain his decision not to pay a poll tax that would support a government that would launch
an unjust war against Mexico and countenance slavery and protect the legal rights of slave holders. In whatever
history of non-violent resistance you read, that essay is a landmark even as Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Apology
are landmarks. Scholars debate where and when exactly Mohandas Gandhi read Thoreau’s Essay, whether it was at
Oxford in 1900 or in South Africa in 1908, when he and others went to jail rather than pay a tax imposed unfairly on
people of color there. One scholar I consulted says Gandhi read (or reread) Thoreau’s account of his night in jail while
Gandhi himself was in jail. One wonders if Dr. King, in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, about to write his famous Letter
from Birmingham Jail in the margins of a newspaper, though of these famous precedents. Now there can be no doubt
Thoreau’s essay contributed to the formation of Gandhi’s practice of satyagraha, which Dr. Martin Luther King himself
would embrace and implement as a young leader of a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. King claims in “Pilgrimage
to Non-Violence,” a chapter from his book, The Montgomery Story, that it was Gandhi who taught him how to read
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as bodying forth a philosophy of nonviolence and love that could be applied by oppressed
peoples fighting for freedom and justice. Prior to reading Gandhi, King claims he took the gospel message of turning the
other cheek and forgiving one’s enemy as applying to individuals, not entire groups. That is a huge debt to acknowledge,
as a Christian preacher descended from generations of Christian preachers, for being instructed on the true meaning of
his own religious tradition by a Hindu leader, though I seem to recall Gandhi also acknowledging Thoreau on having a
similar impact on his relation to the Gita.
That Thoreau influenced Gandhi, King, and Nelson Mandela is beyond doubt, and the impact of that influence in human
history is inestimable. Behind that long story stands, imperturbed, Arjuna’s story in the Bhadavad Gita. So what is the
point of all this? American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in a recent book entitled Not For Profit: Why Democracy
Needs the Humanities, makes the argument that education without the humanities will leave us ill-prepared to create a
habitable future that is just and wisely governed; that the study of history, philosophy, and literature create such
intellectual virtues as curiosity, integrity, and self-scrutiny, habits of the mind and also habits of the heart, especially
empathy, without which a sense of community beyond the family cannot exist. For Nussbaum, Democracy cannot
exist without an educated electorate, and being educated for life means more than being trained for an occupation, and
neglecting to acknowledge that endangers our development and the full flourishing of humanity and a just distribution of
the world’s bounty.
John Ruff has been in the teaching profession for 30 plus years. He has taught in the English department at Valparaiso University since
1989. He specializes in teaching first year students, literary modernism, poetry, children’s literature, and American literature. Besides
teaching in the English department, Professor Ruff is director of Valpo’s CORE programme for freshmen- He helped develop and since
1998 has directed and taught in their first year core class, a year-long interdisciplinary humanities course that all first year students in their
general education programme take there. He says “putting together CORE was the most exciting thing I’ve done in my academic career.”
This inter-disciplinary first year core programme is the cornerstone of their general education programme and constitutes about a third of
the credits required for graduation for most students, no matter what their major.
John Ruff was an Assistant Dean for five years, so he has worked a lot in academic advising. He also served on a University Task Force on
Writing at Valpo that helped to design a campus wide writing programme modeled after some of the best programmes in the United States.
He is also on the Wordfest Committee, Faculty Senate, the Curriculum Committee for the College of Arts and Sciences, the General Education
Oversight Committee, and the Collection Committee for the Brauer Museum of Art.
John Ruff began his teaching career teaching elementary in Rome, Italy, in 1975; He has also taught at the middle school and high school
level. Please visit his personal homepage at the Valpo website http://www.valpo.edu/english/faculty/ruff.php to know more about him. Prof.
Ruff has had three different opportunities to teach in China. He arrived at Ansal University on March 2, 2013 on his maiden visit to India.
YEARBOOK 2013