Featured Teachers: Peter Drake
Get to know some of our teachers through the Proust Questionnaire, liberally adapted from French writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Peter Drake teaches Italian, French and Spanish. He has been a teacher for 15 years and has taught at St. Michael’s for five years. He serves as chair of the Foreign Language Department.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A veterinarian or a lawyer or a university professor.
What is your favorite animal?
The horse.
What is your favorite color?
I don’t really have one, but I like the fact that New Mexico is basically brown and all other colors look beautiful against it.
Your most marked characteristic?
I persevere in what I like and am interested in. I like getting to know other cultures. I am curious about my students and their impressions of life, and take delight in their intelligence.
What do you think are your greatest faults?
I always think I could/should persevere more, do things more thoroughly, set more goals than I do and reach them. Life is an ongoing proof of the immensity of possibilities; this is a daunting fact and an immense challenge.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Reading Tolstoy or Chekhov on a weekend morning in my comfortable chair and staring at the snow on the apple tree in my garden and the changing light as they day progresses, or doing just about anything in Italy or Mexico or France.
Who is your favorite artist or musician?
Beethoven (piano concertos); Nina Simone; Radiohead (Ok Computer); Luigi Tenco; Joni Mitchell.
Who are your favorite writers or poets?
Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Emile Zola, and, why not, Proust. Chekhov’s short novels are a recent wonderful find! Cavafy, in Greek.
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Swann in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; the journalist in Steig Larsson’s books or in Roberto Bolaño’s 2999. The narrator in one of Juan Rulfo’s books.
Who are your favorite characters in history?
Louis IV, Elizabeth I of England and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Crazy Horse. Sitting Bull. Geronimo.
Who are your heroes in real life?
Jeanne Moreau, Bono, Nelson Mandela, among others.
What quality do you most admire in people?
Doing a good job with things they are passionate about. Sensitivity to the pain of others. A tear or three for any beautiful work of art or a sport well played.
Where would you most like to travel?
To the Caucasus mountains, because I’ve just read Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Prisoner of the Caucasus and loved, among other things, the description of the landscape. I think a good landscape description in literature can be sublime.
If you had not become a teacher, what would you like to have done instead?
I would like to have spent more time taking care of trees, but I’m not sure what career that is related to.
What do you most value in your friends?
Love. Sensitivity and sensibility. Patience and attentive listening.
What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
That we ruin this world and then move on to another one: something like the war scene in Avatar.
What is your favorite word?
Not sure, but it would probably be in the Oxford Unabridged, in one of the twenty-something volumes, and I would follow its use through the centuries and examples given.
What is your greatest pet peeve?
I don’t like gloomy department stores or malls, but I’m not sure if that answers the question. Or, asking what tense a verb is in and getting blank stares.
What natural gift would you most like to possess?
There are times when I think it would be nice to be a pilot. Patience. The swiftness and beauty of the horse. The intuition of the snake.
What is your motto?
A groan and a smile and a prayer.
What is your present state of mind?
It depends on the time of day and how well I have slept, but generally a mixture of many elements which, for the most part, keep me in balance with myself and the world.