Anagnorisis

One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something
to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own
-"what you have to give" being, in no small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher, someone who wondered whether you would absorb what she had to give, someone who is, by the time you're old enough to write about the experience, as old as your parents, perhaps even dead - can never really know which of the young people clustered around the seminar table is someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you.