Robert Demeritt, Rest in Peace
9:13 PM
Robert Demeritt, longtime teacher of History and Chinese at the Barstow School, passed yesterday in his sleep. And our hurt can be tempered by doing what Bob always did: investigate, contemplate, write, and share.
Intelligent, humorous and stubborn, Bob taught with skill, precision, and passion. With trademark bow tie and a wit that could polish puns, Bob made the act of learning fun. He also possessed that rarest of traits - the ability to listen.
I said goodbye to Bob on Saturday afternoon. I told him thank you, I asked if he was ready to go. I told him I didn't have any bad jokes. He smiled at me. We held hands. I had wanted to share a passage with him, but the situation didn't really call for it, as he began to drift in and out of light sleep. The passage comes from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, as the headstrong, but honest John Grady Cole heads off into the sunset. McCarthy writes:
"The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was a barren country indeed yet at evening he came upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chattering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come."
That imagery of the red turning black reminded me of the paintings of Mark Rothko, especially his 1964 work Black, Red over Black on Red. Rothko's canvases got progressively larger as he grew older. Rothko certainly knew that, from an art historical perspective, that gigantic canvases tended to be read as "grandiose and pompous." But Rothko went big because he "desired to be intimate and human." He continued, "To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it."
Robert Demeritt, too, painted his life on a large canvas. I am proud to call Bob my friend. I am lucky that he taught me how to be a better teacher, that he showed me how to stay hungry, that he modeled what it meant to be a professional. I miss working with him, talking literature with him, and clinking glasses with him; I also understand his absolutely fundamental importance to the Barstow School.
Barstow will miss you, Robert, but what you crafted there lives on. I will miss you, Robert, but your impact on me lives on.
It goes back to The Bard, again, Robert. "Goodnight, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
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