Professor Professorson

He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, and as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper. It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly, and Arch felt like some master of hounds as he led the boys deep into a story or poem, driving them on with questions, forcing them to test cadence, gesture, and inflection for feint and doubletalk until at last the truth showed its face for an instant before vanishing into some new possibility of meaning. He sometimes arrived at the end of a class dripping with sweat, hardly knowing where he was or how long he’d been there, all his damned dignity gone.

-Tobias Wolff

Phew, long quote. Glad you’re still with me. I’ll explain its relevance shortly.

But first: You might be one of the handful of close, loyal friends who have been reading this blog from its inception, in late 2008, back when it was little other than an inchoate bunch of ASCII characters. (Not that it got much better.) Or you might be a more recent inductee, most likely a fashion-savvy French teenager or an Indian national who owns a travel agency or a macrocephalic Muslim baby with uncommonly advanced Web browsing skills.

To both of those groups, I am much indebted.

This blog started, partly, as a way to document the process of recovering from a very harsh blow -- leaving behind my job and my career and my friends, moving out of the country where I had spent the past seven years -- and, mostly, as a vehicle for bitching. Moaning, groaning, whining, the whole array. You know as well as I do that bitching in front of an audience (that’s you!) is much more rewarding than bitching in front of whatever poor Foolia or Malaria happens to cross my path. More importantly, I like to think that everyone who keeps coming back here shares my sense of humor to some degree, if not my worldview, and that makes me feel less alone. Makes us all feel less alone, I think.

Around the middle of last year, while road-tripping across arid West Coast terrain, my friend Balderdash shared some news: he was going to start a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Generally, I pay little heed to his career choices, considering his obnoxious interest in Romantic German poetry and certain obscure aspects of Japanese culture, but this piece of information caught my attention.

“You mean, I could just compare any two things in literature and someone would pay me to do that for a few years?” I asked.

Indeed, he said. All I needed was a finely tuned research statement, and an idea.

“But I took, like, two literature classes in college, and one was on ‘Lord of the Rings’,” I said.

Not a problem, he said. You have the right background.

“But I never taught a real class in my life,” I said.

Shut up already and apply, he said.

(I’m oversimplifying here. You also need, at a minimum: very high GRE scores, two extremely polished 20-page pieces of literary analysis, four languages, a unique back story, squeaky-clean letters of recommendation, a fair amount of money for application fees, and a boatload of patience.)

And so, here I am, less than a year later. A very generous university in the Northeast has decided that it will waive my tuition and pay me a salary, every month for at least five years, to study and teach literature, and write about what I learn. I’ll travel to conferences. I’ll spend summers abroad. I’ll make undergrads tremble from way up in my ivory tower. (OK, maybe not ivory tower. Whatever the grad student equivalent is -- ramen tower, perhaps.) I am still, to this day, surprised that such a program exists. But that, among other things, is the beauty of the American system of higher education.

Who knows what I’ll do with my degree, if I even make it to the end. If nothing else, it’ll bring newfound prestige to this blog. “I’m reading something by this guy, Dr. Futbol, he’s pretty good,” you can tell your friends. I might teach for a bit if I like it. I might be moved to write about something more substantial than salami. I might lose interest in literature, like I lost interest in daily journalism, and join the Canadian Football League. (That last one seems unlikely.)

During these past few months (years?) of extended super-sabbatical, I’ve been in great company: Foster Wallace, Carver, Hemingway, Salinger, Proust, Roth, Bukowski, Murakami, Cortázar. Which is all well and good, except it felt like looking at a sunset from behind a glass window, because literature cannot be an individual experience, it refuses to be so. Any good piece of art is engendered not simply to entertain, but to probe, to extract commonality, to simultaneously individualize and universalize the human condition. I know who I am, and Cortázar knew who he was, but neither of us can know who we are in the context of everyone else until we start up a dialogue.

It is that dialogue that is missing in my life. I want accountability of thought, like Tobias Wolff (a teacher himself) so eloquently mentioned above. I want to hear stories from others and share stories with others. Not stories about park openings and school closings and gridlock and blight; instead, I want to hear about the small things, about habits and emotions and hushed conversations and tiny ideas. About life as defined by literature -- I want to know where you were when you read “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, and how it made you feel -- and viceversa, about literature as defined by life -- I want to know the ways in which Chabon read you, the ways in which you fit into his universe, and thus fit into mine.

Starting in August, I’ll finally get to hear some of those voices, and I couldn’t be happier.

(I started with a quote and I’ll end with a quote, like every bad graduation speech and wedding toast.)

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” [Oshima] says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads -- at least that’s where I imagine it -- there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.”

-Haruki Murakami