Elizabeth Moose
For forty-two years, Daphne Athas was an encouraging, provoking, sometimes goading, always inspiring, altogether irreplaceable force in my life. Since the spring of 1978 when I was one of fifteen eager undergraduates in her English 34W class, Daphne was to me teacher, mentor, and friend.
Daphne opened up for me the music, power, and possibilities of language. “There’s nothing quite as hopeful,” she said, “as a blank sheet of paper.” Daphne guided but never dictated. She encouraged but refused to play the role of Muse, Pythia, or Authority. She took her students seriously: she believed in our trying, messing up, trying again, finding our own ways, even “hanging ourselves” if that’s what we chose to do. When I wrote a rather overwritten story about an adolescent’s crush on her math teacher, Daphne sent me to Stendhal’s On Love. In English 47W (now known as “Gram-o-rama”), Daphne led me to Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Leonard Bernstein’s “The Unanswered Question.” Daphne affirmed my passions for Tennessee Williams and old movies.
After I graduated, and Daphne and I became friends, she opened to me other pleasures: the work of Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Duras, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Peter Weir, Elia Kazan, Turgenev, many others. She introduced me to her good friends Tony Harvey and Lee Burgess, her remarkable mother, Mrs. Mildred Spencer Athas, her beloved nephew, Dana Francis.
In time, Daphne and I traveled together—always on the cheap—in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt. In Alexandria, we tracked down the flat where C.P. Cavafy once lived. At Giza, we rode a camel and climbed deep into the interior of the Great Pyramid (it smelled like a locker room, by the way). After visiting the temple at Luxor, we munched Easter candy and drank fake beer. We hiked down the citadel at Pergamum and snorkeled off the coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula. We spent the night on Delos (supposedly forbidden) and, in Athens one night, climbed the slick marble steps of the Acropolis to gaze at the full moon. It was on our way down, mis-stepping off a low curb, that Daphne broke her leg (but that’s a story for another day!).
Back home in Chapel Hill and Durham, Daphne and those of us in the “movie group” went—like Tom Wingfield—“to the movies” almost obsessively. Afterwards, over coffee, we’d “mulch over” what we’d seen. Conversation with Daphne—at Joe Van Gogh’s, Elmo’s, the K&W, or on a beach in Greece, after a swim—was always exciting: books, plays, teaching, travel, politics, history, religion, ideas . . . all riches that Daphne shared with me.
Sixty years ago, in Concord, NC, where I spent much of my time leaning over the porch rail of the mill house I lived in, I used to dream about the wider world beyond the dogwoods and pines of my small town.
It’s due in great measure to Daphne Athas that I have, in the years since, explored some of that wider world. When I’m weary of “everyday-ness,” it’s Daphne who still reminds me that beyond the crush of grading, the pressures of campus politics, dishes to be washed, and all the other “crapola,” there is still the wild and intoxicating freedom of words and ideas, and the blue, blue sky over all.
(This remembrance was originally written in support of Daphne’s nomination for the UNC Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement, which “acknowledges a lifetime of contributions to a broad range of teaching and learning activities, particularly mentoring beyond the classroom. It rewards those who help students develop and attain their full potential in important ways during and after their departure from campus.” Not surprisingly, Daphne won.)