Hector Flashcards
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‘I was confusing learning with the smell of old stone’
‘I count examinations, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education’
‘Why do you want to go there?….It’s because other boys want to go there’
‘And now jingling your A levels, those longed-for emblems of your conformity’
‘Ah. Pornography…We must carry on the fight without him’
‘Magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life’
‘And what happens after the exam? Life goes on’
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‘I never understand it…learn it now, know it now, and you will understand it whenever. Then you will have the antidote ready. Grief. Happiness! We’re making your deathbeds here boys’
Hector’s teaching, described by the boys:
‘The pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake’
‘The heart has its reasons that reason knoweth not’
‘It’s not meant for the exam, sir. It’s to make us more rounded human beings’
‘It’s not education. It’s culture’
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‘Is that what you think they are, gobbets? Handy little quotes that can be trotted out to make a point?’
‘Every answer a Christmas tree hung with the appropriate gobbets. Except they’re learned by heart. And that is where they belong and like the other components of the heart not to be defiled by being trotted out to order’
‘Wittgenstein didn’t screw it out of his very guts in order for you to turn it into a dinky formula.’
Literature gives Hector a personable connection to the boys, exclusive from the education system, where he passes on literature to them for life
‘Whatever I do in this room is a token of my trust. I am in your hands. It is a pact’
‘He is trying to be the kind of teacher pupils will remember…He impinges’
‘There was a contract between him and his class. Quite what the contract was or what it involved was hard to say. But it was there’
‘It’s locked against the Forces of Progress, sir’/’So that it’s not part of the system, sir’
‘Pass the parcel…take it, feel it, pass it on…for somebody, somewhere, one day…that’s the game I wanted you to learn’
He has kept up a facade of falsity by committing his life to teaching, since he is not truly happy with the school or his own life.
The boys not understanding the value of his teaching coarsens him.
‘What made me piss my life away in this godforsaken place?’
‘I am an old man in a dry season’
Hector has coped with his sadness over his sexuality and being trapped in school by his immersion in literature, but is still left unhappy with his life.
Also he sees himself - and his ideas and values - as defeated by the reality of the education system, as the boys only see exams as important now.
‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’
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‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something…you had thought special and particular to you…It is as if a hand has come out and taken yours’
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‘Thrown into a common grave he may be, he’s still Hodge the drummer. Lost boy though he is on the other side of the world, he still has a name
‘(Hardy was) My age, I suppose. Saddish life, though not unappreciated’
