Steve Hays

One day when I was about ten years old, an often confused and melancholy boy, I ran to my mother and told her I'd finally figured out my answer to the persistent adult question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "Well?" she asked.

"I want to be a wise old man," the kid I used to be declared. Mom just smiled indulgently and failed (as we well-intentioned adults almost always do) to recognize the insight and determination that kids sometimes have. The kid was serious though. His goal never changed. I have no idea what wise old man in what book or movie the kid had been inspired by (My best guess is Mr. Chips), but he knew he wanted someday to be the kind of man who would help confused kids find their way to a better place.

The goal of learning wisdom necessarily shares an ill-defined border with authoritarianism in its various destructive guises: dogmatism, paternalism, self-righteousness. For a while the kid lost his way and wandered across that frontier into desolate and unforgiving wastelands that nearly destroyed him. But his original goal was an honest and decent one: to do the hard work of learning and understanding; and to help kids who found life as confusing and dark as he did. In time, the demands of good educators helped him see the boundary more clearly, and he made his way to a better place.

He studied hard, thought hard, and struggled hard. He survived high school and went on to college. He got married, had kids, studied at Yale Divinity School, earned a Ph.D. in Classical Greek from The University of Texas at Austin. In the process, he fell in love with the smart and generous moral and intellectual traditions he studied. He tried as an adult to follow the kid's wise and heroic lead—to practice the "natural piety" that Wordsworth valued: the determination of the adult not to abandon the healthy enthusiasms of the child who shaped him: "The Child is father of the Man." Ultimately he spent some thirty-five years introducing kids to the insights of wise thinkers long dead: Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Plato, Jesus.

I'm old now—too old to feel much like a kid—still trying to become a wise old man, still at risk of self-righteousness and paternalism, but viscerally hostile for a very long time now to proscriptive doctrines and dogmatism, parties and partisanship, self-serving games of all sorts.

I'm retired. I have no more students to teach. These days I just try to be a wise old man for my grandkids, who are growing up and beginning to suffer the painful confusion of living in a good and beautiful world that is shamefully vandalized by meanness, corruption, cruelty, and folly. I'm trying in these last couple of decades of my life to share with them some of the best ideas I have encountered in ancient literature and to help them see how those ideas can give them intellectually responsible hope and purpose. So, I write for my grandchildren, but if my books offer any comfort or strength to other readers, ... well, so much the better. That would make the kid very happy.