Rain and Darkness, A Novel and Memoir by Professor Roy Arthur Swanson

Be what you have learned you are. — Pindar

Blueness itself is the holy. — Martin Heidegger

In today’s social climate of political dissension, name calling, and destructive rancor, one theme appears that does not get much argument: we need great teachers. I want to share a little bit about one such teacher, my own.

Professor Roy Arthur Swanson is a remarkable teacher. Although retired, named Emeritus Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he continues to delight his students and his friends with wisdom, prodding, and insights into life, literature, love, and what it means to be human. His latest gifts are two-fold: a new novel, Rain and Darkness; and a public reading in Port Washington on October 24 at 3 p.m. — it is an event to which you are all invited.

The best teachers tell stories; they bring life to their subject matter; they bring their subject matter to life. Professor Swanson, like Dante, is above all else a wonderful storyteller.  A performer of consummate skill, arguably one of the best humanities teachers in the State of Wisconsin and the Midwest, he has touched the lives of tens of thousands of students since he arrived in Milwaukee 40 some years ago. “Swansonians” is a term I have heard applied to those who follow him from subject to subject, class to class, as so many of us have over the decades.

Now, like Nabokov in his lectures, Professor Swanson has brought into relief the story of one man’s life, filled with love, learning, disappointment, loss, glory, deep sadness and great enjoyment at Being. This novelistic memoir, with its highly opinionated, fully engaging narrator, should be on your bookshelves, in your bookbag, open on your bedside table, or, if you must, in your Kindle or iPad. Your narrator is an admitted loser, Peter O. Blaustern, a highly opinionated, sometimes overly pedantic humanities and literature professor, critic, and classicist.

Rain and Darkness is a gift for the thousands of students and those who wish they could have learned from him in real time. A meditative, musing — sometimes raucous and outrageous, replete with political satire, literary criticism, and high adoration for language — R&D is an attempt to tell the story of a human being, who sees himself as a deponent verb (sic!) in novelistic, first-person, memoir style. It succeeds. [Think “potential”; think about “the unhidden”].

Rain and Darkness tells the story of Peter O. Blaustern, an admitted loser. Nicknamed “Ped” by his friends, the novel covers 80 years and does so with narrative pace and grace. Swanson’s students will fondly recall his spirited lectures, always delivered without notes and always filled with more to think about than anyone was able to absorb at one sitting. Swanson shared his knowledge of the western world: from French literature to mythology - from existential philosophy, to Pindar or the Latin poets -his learning, his passion for life, fully informs this novel. The novel is a gift. Not only to his students but to that broader audience of readers who want to meditate upon the course of life, politics, love, and its progress towards death.

A novel written in first person narrative, Rain and Darkness (http://www2.xlibris.com/Bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=96582) is a highly personal memoir. This is not action packed. But as Professor Swanson would remind us, “action” for Aristotle meant “movement in spirit” – it wasn’t car chases or plot-filler that allows an author to ravel and unravel plot elements to achieve emotional catharsis: resolution is from that movement in spirit. If you are familiar with Plato, you will discover the three forces, which imbue mankind at work: the rational, the irrational, and the charioteer.

Rain and Darkness is a novel infused with love, politics, philosophy, literature, war, sex, and life. The novel, covering the years from the late 20’s until today, tells the story of the lifetime friendships, and adversities, between Blackie and Peter and Jordy. These friendships of childhood, driven by rivalry, jealousy, passion, and scholarly questing, span the years of WWI, days of post V-Day romance, and a 50’s, 60’ and beyond — into the 21st century that were filled with love, marriage, and learning. Through Peter’s eyes we experience battlefront fear, battle front romance and scholarly intrigue. The reader receives advice, is taught life- and critical lessons, and is pushed in a liberal political direction to our current now.

This novel is also a summary meditation on one teacher’s lifelong pursuit of giving back for what he received. Among the personal topics we find: Love, friendship, and belief in the Divinity of the Feminine (the White Goddess, the Eternal Feminine who leads us upward), the existential lessons for life and language proffered by Heidegger and the Swedish Nobel Prize winner, Par Lagerkvist. Conceived and woven as a tapestry highlighting friendship, love, loss, glory and death Rain and Darkness is beautifully paced as narrative, by a sometimes exasperatingly funny, sometimes crotchety, glorious storyteller.

Again, you are all invited to Port Washington, WI: October 24 at 3 p.m. in the library. I hope to see many of you, including “Roy’s” students, there. I know it will be a time of joy.