So there it was, there it had been, a teaching life, a career if you must call it that, and Charlotte now looks back on it with a certain satisfaction, and then scolds herself for being smug. I was a conduit, she thinks, that’s all. I was lucky enough to have the knack of transmission—I could get them to see and hear a poem, to absorb a novel. The power is in the stuff itself—language; all you have to do is show the way.
