Some weeks ago a friend of mine who is a professor at a college back east called to tell me he was depressed. We’ve known each other for thirty years or more; we were students together in a class of Modern Greek in Athens. With our professor we had a regular table at a local taverna where we liberally dosed our horiatiki salad days with retsina, conversation, and sexual innuendo. He was into the Greek girls; I was into the professor. Anyway, that was a long time ago.

I’m depressed, he said on the phone, with a touch of self-sarcasm, but when he explained why, I could see reasons for anyone to be depressed. Classrooms filled with students who were motivated only for the sake of their grades. (I should mention he teaches English lit.) Students who complained that his curriculum (John Donne, among others…) was too difficult. Colleagues who no longer appreciated him, or who pressured him into dumbing down his classes in order to keep students—or so he perceived their attitude to be. A lack of friends. No woman in his life. The gloomy winter weather, and Greece, where he spends every summer, still several long months and term papers and final exams and grading away.

He did have some money, a small amount inherited from his mother, and the retirement fund from his job. Enough, perhaps, to buy a small stone house in the upper village of his favorite Aegean island. I urged him to get out while he could, while he was still young and fit and could refurbish a house and make it snug and tight for a Greek winter. That is what I would do, I insisted, if I had the money. He even has friends in Greece who would take him into business with them. Why stay to be insulted, underappreciated, bored? Teacher burn-out: I left the profession before I ever got it, but it must be a terrible and sad thing, because teaching is surely one of the last noble professions on the planet.

I thought about him all this weekend, wondering if he had decided anything, and told myself I would call him. I didn’t get around to it.

On Monday morning a BBC headline caught my eye on the computer screen: shooting on US campus. Almost casually, (thinking, here we go again) I clicked to go to the story; how many thousands of university campuses are there in the country; what are the odds? But oddly indeed, I did think of my friend, and worry briefly.

And read, uncannily, that it was on his campus that the horror was unfolding.

I e-mailed, ARE YOU OKAY, and waited; I thought again, what are the odds: it is a huge school, far larger than I imagined. That afternoon the reply came, Alive and kicking. He had not been on campus, it was not a teaching day. He was worried about his students. He would get back to me later.

I haven’t heard anything more from my friend; he is well, that is all that matters just now. I imagine the kind of collective soul-searching, analysis, grief, that is preoccupying everyone at Virginia Tech just now. Especially in the English department; a woman he had spoken of to me in the past has testified to the killer’s anger, the peculiarly tortured content of his creative writing samples. Did my friend know him or teach him? I expect he will tell me someday; at this point it does not matter.

Like everyone, I am trying to make sense out of this horrible tragedy. Both for my friend’s sake, and on a larger scale. Clearly it was not enough for Michael Moore to make a gifted and eloquent film about Columbine for us to understand. When I listened to the radio that night, the BBC was scathing, you could hear the anger in the voice of the newscaster to have to be reporting “yet another” US school shooting: when would the benighted Yanks ever learn that only the banning of all guns would ever stop these tragedies? One shooting in Scotland some years ago had been enough to change the laws. For 100 deaths by firearms last year in Britain, there were tens of thousands in the United States.

Another friend writes, in his blog [click here for link] for the morning of April 17: “…empathy and tears, if not followed by analysis and understanding, education and change of behavior, are merely orgasmic relief for those who have sensed the brush of death from sufficient distance.” I could say I have sensed it from three, possibly even two degrees of separation—if my friend at Virginia Tech knew the student killer. Analysis and understanding come fairly easily—why I am writing this blog, and you are still reading it and haven’t moved on to my pleasant sojourn in Paris, etc. But how to educate and change behavior, not simply in troubled minds like Cho’s, but also in the stubborn minds of those who defend the right to kill, to bear arms? Who can forget the brilliant sequence in Columbine where Michael Moore visits Charlton Heston? That was Heston’s finest role: the demented gun-lover whom it is so easy to hate. But for every buffoon like that senile Hollywood relic there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of intelligent young people who are unhappy, depressed, homicidal, and for whom it is altogether too easy to buy their way out.

Perhaps my friend at Virginia Tech will find a way to reach his students now, and they will turn to him; perhaps this is one student body that will begin to question the role of money, and guns, in this country. Maybe they will begin to appreciate their teachers more, and the value of things that have no price, which teachers would so much like to share. I certainly hope so, for a terrible price has been paid.

And if they don’t, then I think my friend should move to Greece.

Photo: AFP