Education Quote by John C. Hawkes

A throwaway line that reads like a glitch in the tape, Hawkes turns a supposedly formative ritual into something half-remembered, half-mocked. “I had to go” is the first tell: Sunday school isn’t chosen, it’s endured, filed under civic duty. Then he undercuts even that obligation with “once or twice,” shrinking an institution that trades on repetition into a negligible anecdote. The humor isn’t sitcom-bright; it’s the dry, novelist’s kind that makes authority look flimsy simply by refusing to grant it narrative importance.

The real action is in the sentence’s stumble: “that’s where I commented someplace on hearing.” It’s syntactically off, like the mind backing away from a clean confession. Hawkes gives you the posture of testimony (I went; I heard; I commented) but withholds the satisfying details that would make it edifying. “Someplace” is especially telling: church education is supposed to plant you in a definite moral location, yet he can’t even locate the moment. He remembers the social choreography - listening, responding - more than any doctrine. The subtext is a writer’s skepticism toward packaged revelation: what sticks isn’t God, it’s the experience of being told what to hear and when to speak.

Placed in Hawkes’s broader literary sensibility - surreal, distrustful of tidy realism, alert to institutional violence - the line feels like an origin story in miniature: the first encounter with sanctioned narrative, recalled not as illumination but as noise, coercion, and the faint, awkward impulse to talk back.