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There’s this moment- if you’re lucky, a day or so, between worrying about last term and thinking about the new one- when you remember why you gave up that job in the public school, even though you might have had to take a pay cut. You recall how nice is is to be able to answer “Graduate Degree” on those customer satisfaction surveys, how nice it is to have letters that follow your name, even if it doesn’t correlate to more zeros on your check.
It’s walking down the glass-panelled, glossy-floored hall that smells like old books, and discreetly listening to the people in their offices as you stroll by. It’s hearing the names of places you rarely think about, mathematical equations you left behind irrevocably before the GRE, ancient obscure arguments about Descartes’ position on the soul.
Students brush past in their hoodies emblazoned with the University’s name, their hair messily tied back, Uggs or Birkenstocks or flip flops tapping, though it’s 40 degrees outside. Their backpacks seem to want to encumber them eternally, but you know it’s just ’till May.
It’s the empty break room, the coffee that was made a few hours ago, not even theoretically freshly roasted, and the powdered creamer someone’s spilled on the cabinet in a rush to get to their 10am lecture. You grab the second-to-last muffin and a flimsy cup of coffee and retreat to your office, where your colleagues are discussing relative clause usage and the inconsistencies of cultural time.
A student is waiting, and wants to know her score on the final. She’s one of the ones who really got it this semester, one of those for whom the lightbulb was perpetually shining.
Her eyes when you tell her her grade, her breathless “Thank You”.
Sipping your coffee. Starting it all again.
Job prospects seem dim:
Late offer fortuitous…
Move by end of month???
Yeah, yo da shiz-nit. Fo shizzle.
Pants hanging blithely under the buttocks (how???), you sway into my class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Ears plugged with the detrius of the latest rapper, giving each fellow student in your way the upwards-chin-jut or the one-arm-across-the-chest body thump.
O! The gleaming white of your K-Swisses.
O! The gladness you bring with your basketball jerseys, emblazoned with the colors of Demver, of L.A., of Florida.
You strike quite the figure of glorious youth, you tall, Kanye-lovin’ hoodlum.
And they admire you. They watch you, waiting for the latest slammin’ jab at your teacher, the latest witty repartee, the latest hit from your world papered by MTV.
But only I know, when I watch your grade plummeting, of your exquisite inability to function academically. Only I sit at home, huddled over the latest essay dealing with “You’re Gr8test Heeroe”, wondering where we both went wrong. I alone am witness to the downfall of such a bright star.
And the knowledge is deafening, roaring in my ears as you make the witty remark which sends the class into stitches. When the high-fives are given, the winks from the chicks in the back finished, the breath I take before launching into the next section of the text is one reeking of the desire to snap back, to bring you down a notch, to crush you with the scepter from my ivory tower.
And I hold it.
And center myself, and move on.
O Research Papers!
Lengthy masochistic bile
Giving you all A’s.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T.S. Eliot, 4 Quartets. See the whole poem here.
From a conversation with Ultraguy.
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