¶ Lecturing (1)
Index Entry
Lecturing:
"My daughter’s a dancer. She’s really been a dancer from when she was tiny. She’s a professor of dance anthropology at UCLA. And when she was about 12 she said, ‘Daddy, you’ve been brought up in this New England way that teaches you that it’s very ill-mannered for men to show any emotion, and to make their words with the least possible display of motion. And as a dancer I know that you’re repressing everything important in you, and if you just dare to let yourself move, you’re going to find that your thoughts are coming very much more clearly.’
"And she was really so cogent that I was knocked over by this little child; and I decided that she was right and I would try to do it. It was quite a reverse in all the training I’d had–the Naval Academy and everything else. But today I’m absolutely unaware of my motions and sometimes when I see a film of my lectures, I’m amazed to see that I’m all over the stage like a ballerina. Absolutely unaware of it.
“That first happened to me when I was speaking to the San Quentin prisoners. I was thinking so hard that I closed my eyes and I must have had my eyes closed for half an hour. And when I opened them I was just teetering at the edge of the stage. That’s”
