December 18, 2007

I’ll not be going to Cambridge this summer. Found the news on my email, and am still fighting the complex of emotions. That I would be incalculably–and undeniably-- the best resource for students did not change my assumption, during the very interview, that I would not be chosen. What would profit the students did not, I imagine, enter into the discussion. One would have to look hard to find the last time actual achievement dictated preferment at UNCA. I knew I’d not be chosen because, with the exception of Blake, it would have been difficult to assemble a more perfect congregation of trivial minds than those arrayed to make this choice. Like all trivial minds, they expected to be flattered and to have their triviality held up as a kind of insight. I knew as I was answering their questions that they were not the answers they wanted to hear, and yet, somehow, I thought the fact that they were the right answers would mean something in the end.

How do vain and stupid people manage to gain control of everything? I suppose they get drunk and proud on the heady liquor produced by the mingling of vanity and stupidity, and they reach out and take.

The angels must be astonished at my capacity to expect justice from people I hold in contempt. I wish my reaction could be all contempt and indignation. Too much of it is sadness and simple disappointment for me to sail on just yet, unaffected.

What an odd career I’ve had at UNCA! In some ways–in, for instance, the thing I was hired to do, teach young men and women-- it has been a success such that I find no blemish in it, but only joy and contentment to take with me to the grave. In other ways it has been an unforeseen flop. I had a thousand times more to give than the university seemed willing to take, and this reluctance, this pushing away has always puzzled me. I’m known for my work in the community, but that happened only because my energies were refused “at home.” In the eyes of the larger world, I may be the best known of all faculty here, but that is clearly irrelevant, perhaps even a point against me. I’m passed by constantly –invariably-- by the usual suspects for jobs I could clearly do better, and the only explanation can be that I have been irritating or off-putting to people in ways to which I am myself oblivious. This has saved me time, and I do thank the universe for that. But it has caused me sadness and wonderment and a sense of futility in my career which I do not, at this point, know how to explain to myself. I think it’s all probably for the best, but that conviction is not enough to cut off the puzzlement, the uncertainty, the lingering sadness.