Part Three of the essay Professor Without Portfolio. The exception was writingโand it was more a pledge than a practice. It was by a wide margin the most enjoyable experience of my academic career. It was experiential rather than theoretic; practical rather than abstract. Suddenly, writing became the noblest profession. The newspapers in Mississippi and Georgia that were pointing out the civil rights inequities in the South became the employers of my dreams.
In those days, the Lantern published 15, tabloid copies a day, 5-days a week. I dropped everything else to indulge this new passion. He was right.
And I knew itโbut I could neither confess nor repent of it. Publishing the 8-page magazineโand distributing it after dark without license on the University campus to the applause of those who thought as it did, and the bitter criticism of those who leaned as it did but who preferred a harsher language, an even more radical stance, andโabove all!
Topics for upcoming issues were selected willy-nilly. Not enough attention was paid to soliciting advertisements or sponsors, and in three-months The Spokesman was out of money and I was out of anima.
I had abandoned the Christian persuasions of my youth upon entering college and had not yet found an alternative philosophy for sustainably rebalancing life and ambition, for reconciling success and failure, and for shrinking the psychic distance between mania and depression. At the end, I was entirely exhausted and utterly alone. His passing shattered a prospect constructed more by circumstance than imagination.
