Remembering Glen Pritzker Gideon
Gideon Rappaport, Ph.D., Upper School English teacher
Sailing to Byzantium
Thank you all for being here today. The Pritzker family has invited me to read a poem, and it is my honor to do so. Before I read it, I want to say two things about Glen Pritzker.
Thank you all for being here today. The Pritzker family has invited me to read a poem, and it is my honor to do so. Before I read it, I want to say two things about Glen Pritzker.
First, I want to express my gratitude—to Don Burton, for introducing me to Glen at a time when I needed a lifeline, and to Glen himself for being that lifeline. Hearing from Don that I had decided to leave The Bishop’s School, Glen invited me to join him and Sandy on a Sunday at their house for lox and bagels. Within two hours, Glen had persuaded me that I would find at La Jolla Country Day School a good place to teach and therefore a home. Then Glen went to Chris Schuck to persuade him that I would be good for the school. He was certainly right on the first count; I will leave it to others to decide whether he was right on the second. For his making that connection, and for the ten years of friendship it initiated, my personal debt of gratitude to Glen is great. But I express this gratitude in the name of all of us, for there is probably no one here today for whom Glen has not cleared some path toward a better life and a better community.
Second, I don’t think a week passed at school without my hearing Glen say, “You know me, Gideon”—he always called you by your name, didn’t he? acknowledging your individuality and bringing you into the conversation—“You know me, Gideon: I’m a centrist.” I have been thinking about what the center was that Glen inhabited so persistently, and I have realized that its name is peace. Glen was a peace-maker. He brought people together. He brought together those who were happy to be brought together, like me and Chris Schuck, but he also brought adversaries together, like me and Samuel Beckett. In any adversarial relationship, no matter who the opponents were or what the issue was, Glen could see the good on each side and tried to convey it to the other. He saw the good in every human being—in every student, colleague, friend, and competitor—but also in every argument, in every opponent, and he made it his mission to articulate those goods in order to bring the opponents into a relation of peace. He did his best to resolve the contentions in the English department by acknowledging the value of each member’s point of view. He helped factions in the school understand one another in the name of living and working together in harmony for the good of all, and especially of our students. He was a superb schmoozer on behalf of admissions. Above all, he helped students to make peace with themselves, illuminating their gifts, cheering them in their challenges, de-emphasizing their limitations. I believe it was for the sake of peace that Glen drew each of us toward the center he inhabited. Because of his devotion to peace, even as the immediate pain diminishes, we are going to miss Glen more and more as time goes on.
Glen Pritzker has entered that eternal peace which is the source and goal of all the particular peace-makings he aimed at in this life. To honor his life and his memory, let us challenge ourselves to see the other side of the question a little more, to discern a little more the particular good in the person with whom we are conversing, to bring where we can a little more peace into the world.
The poem I am about to read is by William Butler Yeats. It is called “Sailing to Byzantium.” It is one of the poems that Glen Pritzker loved most, as do I. In four eight-line stanzas it moves symbolically from Ireland to Byzantium, from youth to age, from nature to art, from mortality to eternity.
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
