The things I've found true - John Irwin, Author, 65

You shouldn't be too quick to judge what looks like a lucky break or a bad break. Very often, the things you might think are a bad break turn out to be the luckiest things that could have happened to you.

I think everyone, when they've reached a certain age, looks back at things or periods in his life of which they can say, "that's when I grew up." Those three years I spent in the Navy -- that's when I can say, "That's when I grew up."

I spent those three years on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. That time was probably the best training for management and how to work with people that I could have received. During the 19 years I was chairman of the Writing Seminars, I was able to use simple basic skills of how to define goals and get people to work together. It was one of the luckiest things to ever happen me.

My grandfather was in the Navy, and one of my uncles was in the Navy as well; so, it was clear that if there was a service I was going into, it was going to be that.

I'm a great believer that in your twenties you should try a lot of different things. It is probably as valuable to find out the things you don't want to do, as it is to find out the thing you do want to do.

My sense of doing some kind of service is something I'd recommend to every young American.

I always say that I learned as much from having lunch with the other members of the Hopkins English department every day as I did in the time I was in graduate school. In the Ô70s, the entire English department ate lunch as a group each weekday at the club, and the lunches were very much like mini-seminars in which people would be talking about their work And that just seemed to me -- that was my idea of heaven.

The person who influenced me most in terms of dedication to learning and scholarship was Earl Wasserman, who taught romantic poetry. He manifested what I value most in a teacher or a scholar: intellectual generosity. He would always take time to talk to you about his work, or about your work, and he'd take time to read your work and to make suggestions. He is somebody for whom the present incarnation is someone like Dick Macksey, a kind of model of intellectual generosity.

Once I write about an author, I don't teach the author again for about ten years. The authors kind of go into an eclipse for about a decade along with me. You concentrate so much on the author while you're writing a book, that I often think its best to let what you say about them lie fallow for a while before you come back to it again.

I always tried out some of the things that I was writing in teaching my classes. I think that's a very necessary relationship; the practice of testing out your ideas that you want to write with students to get their reaction, to get their input and to see how well the ideas go over.

Generally speaking, if you're 18, 19, 20, you don't have a long enough memory to know how long 35 or 40 years can be. And that's going to be pretty much the length of your career and working life. So, if you're going to be doing something for 35 or 40 years, you better have decided that its something you not just like, but that you love.

John Irwin, currently the Decker Professor of Humanities, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991 and recently named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.