UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

North 40

Features

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

North 40

Beginning again

Julius Lester




	Photograph ©2003 by Julius Lester

FOR MANY YEARS I THOUGHT I would teach at this university until my death. But one evening in December 2002, I was rearranging books on a shelf at home trying to make room for more. Like many people I know, I own more books than I will ever be able to read (which doesn’t stop me from continuing to buy them). On this particular evening I found myself aching for the time to read at least some of those wonderful books. With an almost shocking immediacy the startling answer presented itself – retire from teaching. I was shocked even more when I heard myself say, yes.

I will be 65 in January and it seems that the next phase of soul-making, which has been my life’s task, is to withdraw energy from teaching and writing, creative activities through which I have tended my soul for more than half my life. I retire in order to return to the places where my soul’s journey began.

The act of reading is an encounter of soul with soul. Reading is that paradoxical social act which can take place only in solitude. Sitting alone, absorbed in a book, I am intimately involved with another who has dared to put his or her soul on paper and invited me to enter. Reading was the first passion of my life and I look forward to the child-like excitement of opening a book, not knowing where it will take me, but oh so eager to be taken to a theretofore unknown part of myself.

I am also retiring to return to the other passion of my youth – art and photography. I began studying art in high school and minored in art in college, studying with Aaron Douglas, the premier artist of the Harlem Renaissance. I turned to photography in the mid-1960’s when I went to Mississippi and encountered such beauty in the land and the faces of black people that I knew I would never have the words to express what I was feeling.

Through reading I learn to see my soul through the words crafted by others; in art and photography I see my soul in the infinite ways light, shadow and color shape and mold the physical world. I carry my digital camera with me everywhere because I cannot know when my eyes will be delighted by the momentary interplay of light and shadow illuminating a tree, a hillside or field in a way it will never be seen again. For almost two years now I have photographed the sky and the western hills from the windows of my office on the seventh floor of Herter Hall. Repeatedly I have been awed by the shapes and colors of clouds, the angles and quality of light on the hills, dark slanting lines of distant rain and the flocks of geese that suddenly appear, coming from and going to a somewhere only they know.

When I get home I take the memory card from my camera and download the images into Adobe Photoshop on my computer. Often I work with various filters, transforming the photograph into a photographic art piece as I seek to express and communicate the feeling that impelled me to press the shutter button at the instant I did.

And so I retire in order to live more wholly in the realm of the imaginative which is found in books, the same realm I explore almost every evening when I sit and stare at my computer monitor at images of the world I have managed to pluck from the unrelenting flow of time. Whether I look up from the book I am reading and say to my wife, Milan, “Listen,” or hand her a just finished print of photographic art, I am saying the same thing:

“Come. I want to show you what I saw today.” Which is a simple way of saying, “This is what delighted my soul today and I want to share that with you.”

And also, with you.

[top of page]

Beginning again

Beginning: more images