The intellectual formation happened in the spaces between the professional work. In the years of kitchen labor before the ANT. In the years of ANT apprenticeship before Broadway. In the long career in film, during the waiting-around periods that constitute so much of the actual time spent on a film set. He was always reading, always thinking, always adding to the store of what he knew.
This continuous, self-directed, unaccredited education is itself a model of something. It is a demonstration that the formal institutions through which knowledge is typically transmitted are not the only pathways to knowledge, that a person of intelligence and discipline and genuine curiosity can build significant intellectual capacity through the materials that ordinary life provides — if they are willing to do the work.
The waiter gave him the access to the materials. The reading lessons were the unlocking of a door that had been effectively shut. What he did once the door was open was entirely his own affair.
He walked through the door for eighty-five years after the waiter opened it.
## Seventy Years of Teaching Himself
The span of Poitier’s active engagement with ideas and with language — from the reading lessons around 1944 to his last public interviews before his death in 2022 — is approximately seventy-eight years.
Seventy-eight years of reading. Of thinking. Of the specific practice of attention that acting requires and that he brought to every role and every book and every interview and every diplomatic appointment and every grandchild.
The old waiter in the closing restaurant gave him the first two years, more or less. The other seventy-six he did himself.