The scene was a classroom in an old brick Catholic boys school. At the podium, Father D., dressed in black, his white wavy hair combed straight back, introducing the final section of “Macbeth.” Women scream somewhere in the castle; Lady Macbeth, no longer able to stomach her own corruption, has taken her life. A messenger tells Macbeth the news. Having “supp’d full” of his own horrors, he can hardly attend to his wife’s death. His words are heart-rending and hopeless.

At the front of the classroom, Father D. fingered his white clerical collar. Boys, he said, in the old days our students would have memorized a speech from Macbeth. Those boys had intellectual curiosity, and knowing Shakespeare was what it meant to be an educated person. But the boys of today, he said, looking around the room at us, I’m not sure the boys of today have same spirit, the same drive to learn. Perhaps tomorrow I will be proven wrong. Perhaps tomorrow one or two of you will raise a hand and say that you’d like to recite this speech by Macbeth. We’ll see tomorrow if any of you boys have that same spark of excellence as the boys of former days.

Father D.’s exhortation really burned me. But on my ride to school the next morning I read Macbeth’s speech over and over again until I easily had it down. In English class, Father D. returned to his grim theme. Well, he said, now we find out whether any of the boys of today have the same spirit of excellence as the boys of yesterday. I imagine that the answer is going to be no. Will any of you raise a hand now and step forward to recite Macbeth’s speech?

I didn’t like his crude motivational message any better the second day than I did the first. I ran over the opening of the speech in my head, and the teacher asked again: Will anyone step forward to recite? My hands were on the desk, and I left them there. Father D. moved his class on to other things.

That was a long time ago. I sometimes imagine meeting him again, walking up to him, showing him Macbeth’s speech typed out on a sheet of paper. Then I would crumple the paper and throw it down. I would speak the lines from memory as I do now, these words about the depths to which we must all hope not to descend:

[The Queen, my lord, is dead.]

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way
To dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

But let’s let Father D.’s ghost recede from the room now.  Life is for the living; and so is Shakespeare. In the classroom, some teachers think joyless grim discipline moves young minds. Shakespeare knew it was the juicy mess and horror and joy of humanity that move us. The standing ovations last week at “Twelfth Night” easily prove it so.

They had never imagined that they might fail. After all, on the morning after Thanksgiving Santa’s helicopter landed in the parking lot of this shopping center to start the holiday season. Elvis Presley’s Rolls Royce had been displayed there, with 16 coats of gold paint flecked with real gold and leather seats in the back and a little bar you could see from the other side of the velvet rope. This shopping center had everything. Surely there was a present for their grandmother.

But she was not easy to buy for. She kept gumdrops in a dish for her grandchildren but she also owned a French poodle with a frantic, yapping disposition that only an old person could love. She believed that the Coca-Cola in six ounce bottles tasted better than the Coca-Cola in larger bottles. She made fresh applesauce. They knew her narrowly, the way kids do, and were unable to recognize her in the black and white photograph of the dashing 1920s couple. She was recently widowed and she didn’t drive and it was too far to walk to the grocery store or the church. She lived life almost completely in the kitchen and living room of her little house, they thought.

In the last hour before closing time, customers thinned out and the boys retraced their steps. The bookstore. She was their warm, familiar grandmother, but they had no idea what she might read there on the other side of the long divide between youth and age. The refreshment stand. They didn’t dare buy themselves a fresh pretzel to share, as their funds were so low. The gift carts were stacked with odd cheeses and meats that required no refrigeration and boxes of novelty crackers and sweets that felt half-empty when lifted for a closer look. They considered a number of strange knickknacks likely to be tucked out of sight in a closet forever. In the holiday spirit shopkeepers had conspired somehow to fill the whole place with junk. Taunted a little by joyous Christmas music, the boys pressed on. Their time grew very short.

By rehearsing what they knew of her circumscribed life, they ended up at last, nearly in desperation, in the housewares department of one of the larger stores. But a cooking spoon or a potholder seemed an embarrassingly bland present for their grandmother. The boys couldn’t have put it into so many words, but buying her housewares felt somehow like a cruel accusation that she was just an old woman living alone with her poodle dog in her little house.

But in housewares the boys found a white, quilted toaster cover with a happy poodle on the side. There was a loose thread, a Made in China label, and a price of three dollars, which they could still afford. A gift is a hunch about another person, a clue about how deeply the receiver of the gift is known. She did love her dog Mitzi. The white fabric was bright and the image of the dog was cheerful and vivid. They were out of time. Maybe this gift was okay. It would have to be.

So they bought it in the last half hour of Christmas shopping and wrapped it that night and handed it over dutifully the next morning. Later they heard that she loved it because it was so unexpected and so well chosen. And there on the tidy counter in her narrow, sunny kitchen that sometimes smelled of chicken roasting or apples stewing, she covered her toaster with the cloth image of that bouncing poodle for the remaining few months of her life.

That juxtaposition – the intimate proximity and neutral brutality, the arm stretched out not to touch but to maim – will stand for many of us a low mark on the barometer of compassion.  I have my book-slam ugly moments, sure, but I’d never unhook from humanity enough to do that.

This smug conclusion drummed its fingers on my conscience when I attended the Dismas House Forgiveness Breakfast, in the new Community Corrections and DuComb Center—an expanded halfway house that provides work release, stability, safety, and a web of friendship for ex-felons as they get their footing back in a community that rarely greets them with open arms.

That morning, the atmosphere in the Center was buoyant; people in suits – or the sweater-and-scarf academic equivalent – took in the dining room’s freshly painted, if institutional, concrete walls, and listened to several residents tell their stories with quiet composure, stories that were both harrowing … and familiar. A divorce, a layoff from work, a family tragedy, a dip into addiction, and then a bad snap decision – one any of us could make – and then, incarceration.

The cracked-open humility in those stories of growth reminded me, uneasily, that I’d risked little of myself that morning.  I’d shown up to sit with colleagues, I listened, I wrote a check, and after an hour I stood up with most of the rest of the room --pleased, absolutely, to have attended, but already mentally rehearsing the day’s campus appointments as I felt in my book bag for my car keys.  I’d taken notes on the fact that anyone can prepare a supper once a week for Dismas residents – not just to drop off the food, but to sit down, and actually share the meal. Would I do this?  I’m no pepper-spray cop, but I can hold at arm’s length situations that deserve better.

The generous vulnerability of the Dismas residents stayed with me, though, and loosened a sharp childhood memory that hadn’t risen to the surface in a while.

When I was nine, a mid-week suburban evening that had been humming along suddenly went dark and terrible.  I was in my bedroom, rereading a favorite book by the radiator, my folks were catching up after work in our paneled Seventies kitchen.  My older sister was outside … or had been, until there was a fumble at the back screen door and my sister staggered into the house, dark blood running from her ear down her neck, and so not my sister, but possessed, a crazy person, raving, eyes rolling. ~ Dad’s running to dial the phone, my mom’s trying to capture my sister’s flailing arms in her own, and I’m bawling and breathless, tearing outside at the first sirens I hear winding down out front – police cars? I shook my small arms, channeling grade-school outrage and yelled: “We need DOCTORS, not the police, stupids! Doctors for my sister!” I ran back inside, trembling with terror.  But then I went still as I tracked the cop’s practiced glance around the house, realizing that his deliberate sizing-up of the scene meant something even worse was unfolding. I saw our house through his wary eyes—the bloody, raving child fighting the arms of a parent, an after-work beer on the counter—and realized that my house, and my scared, heroic parents, were under suspicion.  I’ve never felt less safe, less sure who was on my side.

I ran back outside … and in the chaos of flashing lights and gawkers, I saw a still and open figure ten feet away.  Mr. Lundquist from next door, a towering, sharp-angled man whose booming voice usually scared me. But now he was transformed, kneeling low and quiet.  He looked me full in the face, eyes soft, and spread his arms wide. I ran right into them.

Inside the house, the misinterpretation quickly passed; the EMTs figured that my sister had fallen off our backyard jungle-gym.  It was serious: a concussion that soon bloomed into a coma, followed by a long recovery … but mercifully, a full one.

I, on the other hand, haven’t recovered, mercifully, from learning the bravery it takes to throw open your arms to another person … and the equal measure of bravery it takes to rush in.

Maybe this is a holiday story, after all.

Of course, there are ways to escape the world. I had a friend in college who purposely sauntered through the halls mumbling to himself, because he didn’t want anyone to think of him as useful. He wanted only to read and study, and the surest way of guarding his solitude was to appear incompetent or unhinged. In the long run, the plan failed. Today this friend is one of the busiest people I know. His sense of social responsibility proved too powerful.

Because I find myself torn between these two possibilities, I may be able to explain to you the value of uselessness, the position occupied by artists, philosophers, babies, and comedians. We are suspicious of artists and philosophers. The only reason we don’t feel the same about babies and comedians is that we don’t take them seriously. Babies can’t help belonging to the club of uselessness, but they provide an instructive example. Why does a laughing baby fill us with joy? It is because the baby is so purely inspired. In her delight, she has no agenda, no concern. A happy baby is idle, purposeless, and completely alive. She shows us how to relax our minds, which is the first step toward inner peace and creativity. We laugh with her, and participate in her joy, but we ignore what she tells us about ourselves.

To take an example from the adult world, a philosopher is also useless, by design. And obviously, I don’t mean the typical American philosophy professor, who is basically a mechanic of thought, a logician and a scholar. That sort of “philosopher” justifies his existence by being useful, by solving practical problems. He makes thinking serve a worldly purpose. But the lover of wisdom, the philosopher in the original sense, is like the poet or the comedian, in that he doesn’t serve, he doesn’t seek any practical end. He is faithful to a kind of knowing that transcends usefulness, calling us back to the first and most difficult questions, questions that can’t be answered once and for all. Even if he arrives at answers, they aren’t useful in the usual sense.

At college, we teach “critical thinking,” which is a skill, involving mastery of logical techniques. And that’s good. That’s useful. But the relationship between critical thinking and philosophy is like the relationship between the principles of design and the wonder of imaginative art. One is governed by rules; the other is only itself when it surpasses all preconceived rules. And how do you teach that? How does the rule-bound adult learn to think – and to love thinking for its own sake? How can the yoga student learn to breathe like a baby? It’s all about giving up on usefulness. The way of uselessness is the hardest path in the world to follow, precisely because it is endless, starting and ending where you are standing now.

Small-boulder sized clods of newly-turned black earth, fields of stubble and the occasional truck with a stream of corn being shot into it: that was the landscape-beside-the-roads that I recently was driving. Sights to warm the heart of any good eater: that’s what I saw while travelling Indiana during this harvest season.  Calls to mind that lyric from the Joel Mabus song, “And a big cornfield looks mighty pretty.”

This season of harvest and Thanksgiving stirs not only my good-eater self, but also prods that sleeping pioneer stock that’s down in my soul from just a few generations back. Even though it’s where it comes from now, I know that food didn’t always come shrink-wrapped. Subsistence farming was the toddler persona of this nation’s adult-self.

Harvest time with its incredible abundance dope-slaps me into reflections of what plenty we have in this country. Think about the irony of our oftentimes deliberately attempting to limit our intake of food while others have barely enough. Truly, we often are the poster-people for the case of living to eat rather than eating to live.

Reflections on the topic of food, brought about, no doubt, by this time of harvest and Thanksgiving, led to my reading Thomas Keneally’s recent book, “Three Famines.” In it, he gives a general overview of the physical and mental processes of starvation – pretty horrifying and unimaginable from where we sit – then writes specifically about the three hunger-events.  Ireland in the 1840’s, Bengal in the 1940’s and Ethiopia in the 1980’s are the “three famines” of the title. Although seemingly unrelated as to world-area and time period, there is a striking commonality and it’s not the traditional “act-of-God” explanation.  “Acts of God:” droughts, floods, etc. often begin the privations, but the human hand exacerbates the problems into a cataclysm.

I have long heard that the cause of hunger is not lack of food, but rather a problem of distribution. Keneally’s research shows that to be the case. The root of that distribution failure is not, as we might suppose, remoteness and inaccessibility of those starving, but rather of “tyrannical powers.” Nobel-prize winning economist, Amartya Sen says, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” In other words, famine is not a production problem; it’s a political problem.  People don’t always “play nicely” as their mothers admonished them to.

Although we are in an economic downturn, we remain a nation of plenty. We all have heard the story of the person, supposedly from an old Soviet-block country, who shortly after first coming to this country, was taken into a supermarket. When viewing the selection and overstocked shelves, that person broke into a bout of weeping.  The cause of that loss of composure was explained as the person’s mental comparison of the array in the supermarket versus the long lines for meager provisions in the person’s homeland. Plenty versus privation can be a powerful contrast. But, it’s a contrast that we often fail to consider.

As Arthur Miller had his character say, “Attention must be paid.” As we tie on our good-eater bibs for celebration and partaking of the fruits of the earth especially over this next week, give some thought to those who our mothers used to refer to as the “starving children in other lands.” Attention could be the beginning of the solution. It would be right and just if everyone had the opportunity to be a good-eater. Beyond that, there is no punchline. To quote the inimitable Porky Pig, “That’s all folks.”