Crossing Paths with Nelson Pike
My Serendipitous and Sometimes Very Brief Encounters with Some of the Most Influential Philosophers of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
It was my first quarter at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I was a recent transfer student, and so had a few philosophy courses under my belt. I was ready for my first upper-division jobber.
The class was Metaphysics.
I recall walking into class and seeing Nelson Pike for the first time. A tall, remarkably tanned statesman-like figure, with a deeply etched face, the Marlboro Man type, who sported chopped short gray hair, combed to the side with his hand. He wore glasses, and revealed a brilliantly white smile—the clever kind that sort of sashays to one side. He was surrounded by students pleading for his permission to add the class.
I had overheard a grad student while on my way in tell another that Pike had done his PhD at Harvard. He had worked with Quine and all that.
His area of specialization was Philosophy of Religion.
When it was time for class to begin, the crowd around him dispersed and he picked up a stick of chalk from the aluminum tray at the bottom of the blackboard, held it between his index and middle fingers, and began to smoke it. He slowly walked the front of the room. He put the piece of chalk to his lips, pretended to inhale, pulled it away, and puckered as though blowing out. A student caught his eye, and he raised his caterpillar-like eyebrows, signaling to the student that he knew he had been caught and had hoped that the student was enjoying the show. He combed his hair again with his hand. Although in his late fifties, he looked like Ernie from My Three Sons. I am not kidding. He looked just like a fifty-ish-year old Ernie from My Three Sons:
His sense of humor and willingness to play were on full display from the get-go. The class grew ominously quiet as he began to profess.
As he lectured, though it never felt like a lecture, he would occasionally take a good hit from his make-believe cig, which, it became clear, coincided with his wanting to emphasize something he had just said. His belt-buckle was off-kilter, at some point during the day spun to the side of his hip. He walked slowly, intensely deliberate. At one point he sat down on an imaginary chair.
One thing was for sure—no one could take their eyes off him.