O'CONNOR, David K. Plato's Bedroom: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2015.301 pp. Cloth, $28.00--When a teacher no longer teaches a course, but wants to provide a substitute for others, it might take two forms.

One, with videos of lectures and discussions, with assignments, exemplary answers, and testimonials from students, would have ups and downs, loose ends, chatter, yet with sparks of eros, bits of its wildness, and would convey the experience, even to the "yet unborn."

Another form, in print and in prose, would provide as perfected, completed, and finished a version of the inquiry at the heart of the course, as the teacher, now the writer, were able. Aspiring to wisdom, this fruit of long inquiry, would be a book, fit especially for fellow inquirers, now and ages hence.

Why would a teacher, still teaching a course, issue a version of it? What should those still taking the course do with it? And what of the completion the teacher might later achieve in a book?

The subject of love is certainly serious, and vital. What should one think of love? What is truly loveable? Beauty? Truth? Wisdom? Or a human being? Who should one choose to love? Woman? Man? And to what end? Friendship? Marriage? Children? At its heart, Plato's Bedroom is engaged with these questions, serious for all human beings, all countries, and our civilization, and vitally serious to the young, who must decide them, and choose, and then live the one life they will ever have accordingly.

For O'Connor, ancient wisdom resides in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, while modern love is spread out, in Shakespeare's Othello and Midsummer's Night Dream (strangely not Romeo and Juliet or A Winter's Tale, let alone Anna Karenina), in some short stories ("Death in Venice" and, especially, four stories by Andre Dubus), and in quite a few movies (festive "Babette's Feast," disordered "Hannah and Her Sisters," repellant "Exotica"). Attending to Plato and also to literature, rather unusual in "philosophy," makes for richness, but most stories are recounted at a level and length assuming the reader does not know the originals, maybe need not. O'Connor criticizes our impoverished language of love, "sex," "f--," and "sexual intercourse," but does not recur to Shakespeare's bawdy for refreshment. Would Platonic wisdom help modern lovers? Or is something modern superior to Plato? Perhaps only in hailing Humanae Vitae, recognizing that the "pill" severs the natural link of eros and children, and affirming the supervening moral bond of marriage, does O'Connor declare something. However, that there is an inherent tension between climbing the ladder to philosophy, as Diotima exhorts Socrates, and having a family seems unrecognized. Nietzsche said a philosopher who marries belongs to comedy, and probably meant one who does not belongs to tragedy. And what of priests?

If Plato's Bedroom were a book, one would have to note: translations not specified; quotations not footnoted--there are, in fact, no footnotes at all--an index with gaps; mentions of a few favorites instead of a bibliography (to include Scruton's Sexual Desire); no pointers to further inquiry, or to opposing views; table of contents and introduction that make it hard to foresee the path ahead; frequent reliance on the will ("I'd like to start from ... I'm reminded here ... Let me move from these ...") providing no guidance of reason; and the blur of demotic diction. True, an expression heard in a dorm, a party, overheard in a tryst, may name something better than an inquiring gentleman scholar would write, and what reassures a student "this prof speaks like us" might open ears, but to elevate his mind, better words are needed. Auditing a discussion, a blind man ought to detect who the teacher is. Among the usual run of errors one is revealing. In the midst of "Les evenements" of 1968 DeGaulle was not recalled to rule; his disappearance, rumored to consult the troops in Baden-Baden, "rang the bell and the children came in from recess" (Raymond Aron to the author). He had been in charge for a decade. The error suggests a remarkable inattention to our world, in the blindered author and the circle one presumes he shared his manuscript with.

Plato's Bedroom is not a book but something else very worthy of appreciation. This version of what O'Connor has taught for years, and still does, gives some sense of the whole course, what the students did, wrote, thought, what he may have responded with, and if the course be as good as the subject, how it will touch the lives of all rolling on after--for as Henry Adams said, "a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

Many of the things that mar a book do not mar a course, and others actually make evident its excellence. That it might be hard for a student to know exactly what O'Connor thinks about some big questions, having to find out what the stories say, and discussing modern love would stir the soul to study. For a teacher whose courses are a search--the dedication to his students reads, "If I didn't know you, I would have forgotten myself'--the shared course will be an inquiry, a self-examination, a search, an adventure, with high heart, and high demands, so each student attain intellectual virtue by practicing it, and finally issue in great discoveries. There is a fine line between saying too much and too little. You need to say something to stir inquiry and yet not too much, lest your view foreclose the student's long search, and your awesome full-dazzle palaver squash the desire. It is wise not to wax too wise. Every once in a while is enough to inspire admiration.

It's been a pleasure, reading Plato's Bedroom, to peek in on O'Connor's course, appreciate how good it must be for students, and imagine how it could be for one's own children--as the Gospel almost says, "no dad's wisdom is appreciated by his own child until someone else says the same"--but also discover new things, chief among them for me, Andre Dubus, an author surely worth putting on one's "must read this month" list, even if it is only in 38th place because one hasn't yet read such works beloved for their wisdom as Don Quixote, Magic Mountain, and The Search for Lost Time.

Plato's Bedroom belongs to a new genre, the course-book. Books are "the precious life-blood of master spirits," and yet courses, conversations with great teachers, the greatest being Socrates and Jesus, are more. An academic reflection of that priority would make the record of such a course, such a "course-book," a proper substitute for a scholarly "contribution to knowledge," release young scholars from the obligation to decide some important question prematurely, and later give us all a book worth reading, savoring, even rereading. The recognition of this genre, the course-book, would go some way to restoring the nobility of teaching, by setting aside the anonymous evaluations of the learned by the unlearned, and compelling administrators to visit courses, or if unwilling, restore the rule of academe to those who do ei\joy being in a classroom, teaching and learning.

American academe used to have fine professors who never published a book, for example Richard Kennington at Catholic, and might again if such a course-book as O'Connor has published were given greater recognition. One of the best of us in Yale grad school just could not write, and Swarthmore did not have the wisdom, though recognizing how good his classes were, to declare him the exception to the rule, publish or perish. What a waste! Of him of course, and of the loving attention students would have enjoyed, and then the wisdom they might have gained for themselves and given to others the rest of their lives.--Michael Piatt, Friends of the Republic