Philosophy Class
Oct 26
2 min read
By Dale Scherfling
The old professor walked in late, as usual, a stack of ungraded papers under his arm. He set them down like ballast and looked over the room of half-awake sophomores.
"Define the universe in twenty-five words or less," he said. "And give three examples."
A few students laughed, the kind who always laughed first, just in case. One kid in the back started writing immediately, as if he'd been waiting his whole life for the assignment.
"Is there a right answer?" someone asked.
"There are many wrong ones."
The room got to work. The front-row overachiever crossed out half a page trying to appear intelligent. The class clown wrote three words, laughed, and scratched them out. A girl with green hair stared at the ceiling. Near the back, a student named Marcus - who almost never spoke - wrote six words and stopped: The universe is where my brother went.
His brother had been killed in an automobile accident a week before.
The professor read it and looked away.
He wandered the room, watching. He wasn't testing their knowledge. He was taking attendance of a different kind - who rushed in, who hesitated, who hid behind jokes, who tried to tell the truth.
When the hour was nearly up, he paused at the front.
"Every one of these answers," he said, lifting the stack, "is a small autobiography pretending to be a definition."
Outside, a delivery truck downshifted on the hill. Inside, the room filled with the soft scratch of people trying to define everything they didn't yet understand.
Dale Scherfling is a fulltime writer/poet, creative writing instructor, and retired U.S. Navy photojournalist. A former newspaper sportswriter, editor, and photographer, he is the recipient of three U.S. Army Front Page Journalism Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Chiron Review, Close to the Bone, Yellow Mama, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, and Mangrove Review, among others. He has eighty accepted publications across literary journals and magazines.
