On Losing a Mentor

Back in January of this year, before 2020 became a year that many of us would rather forget, a woman who was quite important to me died of a very aggressive lung cancer. The official diagnosis came just a month before her passing. Lise van Boxel, a mentor from my time at St. John's College in Annapolis, was far too young for this aggressive sickness. A hole in the fabric of the cosmos was ripped open the day that she passed, and nothing will fill it.

It's taken me this long to be able to write something about her-- her life, her death. Writing about Lise has proven difficult, not only for all of the usual reasons that crop up when a dear person dies, but because we became acquianted with one another on account of writing itself; she was my Junior Language tutor at SJC. Writing was the thing that brought us together, the thing over which we toiled communally. On account of this, I've held myself to an impossible standard when it comes to the task of writing something about her. I'm certain, however, that'd she'd want me to stop worrying about writing and simply write. And so it goes.

Among the many oddities that make up an education at St. John's, there exists the fact that relationships between thinking people there (students, tutors, alumni, staff-- anyone, really) can and do form very quickly and with an incomparable intensity. When I walked into class on the first day of junior year, I understood quickly that Lise was going to be a person who would change the course of my intellectual life. She was an incredibly intense person and educator-- some in the class would probably have said she was "intimidating," but I don't think this is quite the right word. Intimidating is a word sometimes used to describe women who simply do not conform to traditional social stratifications. Lise was no conformist, but nonetheless, she deserves better descriptors. She was acutely discerning, vibrant, magnetic, and, more than most everything else, compassionate.

The junior year is traditionally spoken of as the toughest of the four spent at St. John's due to the intensity of the coursework in the all-required curriculum, but I was having the time of my life. As we worked through la Rochefoucauld's Maximes and Racine's Phèdre, as we had our hearts broken by Jacques Brel's "Ne me quitte pas" and belted out La Marseillaise (much to the amusement of classmates in the rooms next to ours), our little band of aspiring Francophiles reached out toward some of the deepest, most lasting, most incandescent truths of our lives. In the spring, we read Nietzsche. Studying Nietzsche with Lise was like learning to play the piano by becoming J.S. Bach's roommate. There's nothing quite like someone sharing her life's work in a completely unassuming but yet totally consuming way.

Every encounter with Lise was like a shock to the thinking system, a warm and restorative commingling of practical wisdom and transcendent reaching to bigger, hidden truths. No sentence was ever wasted, no conversation ever forgettable. In the sea of philosophers, poems, hymns, and scientific revelations that was St. John's, Lise was a lantern-bearer, a person who could guide a certain sort of soul through tumultous moments toward the solid ground of self-knowing.

When most people think of the word mentor, they think of someone who goes to great lengths to pass on the hard-won lessons of a life well lived to a mentee, who receives said wisdom and is forever changed. I think, however, that Lise redefined that word for me. Though my respect for my St. John's education is significant, no earthly paradise is complete without a serpentine element. At St. John's, that element takes the following form: educators, having committed their lives to the pursuit of truth, take on young and aspiring thinkers as apprentice-like followers. Cults of personality develop. Educators, even some of the best-intentioned of them, can treat students as golems to be crafted out of the materials belonging to a certain, cliquish school of thought. And we, the students, might be invited (however unconsciously) to become knockoffs-- cheap imitations of our tutors, themselves disciples in the same tradition of golem-craft. Here, disagreement breeds disappointment. Truths are pursued, but only truths that fit within a certain box. However benign this tendency to create an intellectual "legacy" may seem, the effect is damaging, and its consequences are long-lasting. I cannot help but look back on some of my cherished relationships at the college with a tinge of regret.

But this was not Lise's way. She was one of only a few educators in my adult life who did not seem to be interested in comingling the art of education with that of legacy-making. For this, she has my deep respect and lasting gratitude. It is all the more impressive because of how extremely likely I was to try to fashion myself in her image; rather than allowing me to fall deep into idolatry, she took my nervous energy and self-doubt, hidden behind a false wall of pretend confidence, and redirected me toward self-actualization. She invited me to create. To be the first to travel a path that only I could see, that only I could define. To love wisom. To write poetry. To fight for something personally significant. To be less judgmental, and more curious.

I moved recently, back to my home state of Ohio. In the course of unpacking, I found essays, class notes, and a few scribbled correspondences between Lise and me. Seeing her handwriting on the pages of my college essays at first provoked tears. Then, as I read her notes, her careful questions that opened new philosophical landscapes, encouraging reminders, sentences that carved deep chasms in my soul, it felt for a moment as though I were once again participating in one of our cherished conversations. I closed my eyes and could almost see her across the seminar table, feel the intensity of her thought, see the connections that she could find in even the murkiest texts. I miss her terribly.

Warspeak: Nietzsche's Victory over Nihilism, the book that Lise completed just before her diagnosis, comes out in just a few weeks. Once again, I will have the chance to connect with her over writing. Her writing. It was language that brought us together, and language that will keep my connection to her alive. She once closed an email to me with the following words. They are simple, penetrating, and priceless to me. They were written by the woman who was my true mentor. How lucky I was. How lucky I am.

Always remember that your character and intellect enable you to do pretty much whatever you want. I know that you want to help others in some way. You always will, no matter what path you choose; it is part of who you are. My remaining wish for you is that you develop more faith in yourself, and I have little doubt that you will develop it.