In “Tennessee Williams on a Streetcar Named Success” (originally published in The New York Times in 1947 and later as an introduction to The Glass Menagerie), Tennessee Williams—to condemn the sleep-inducing “seduction of an effete way of life” brought on by success—writes this:
Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
Williams asserts that “what’s good for you” (artists/creators) “if you’re at all serious in your aim” is “the obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction.” As fellow creators, teachers with these same commitments—if “serious in [their] aims”—create lives of meaning for themselves and students. Williams notes the deathly sound of opportunity passing: an uninspired student who cannot not see or hear “the monosyllable of the [classroom] clock” is “Loss, loss, loss, unless” we as educators “devote our heart to its opposition.”
