Cambridge

July 14, 2011

Retired bitterly last night in all my clothes, against the cold. Exact copy of yesterday today at dawn.

Teddy says so me, “We don’t know anything about you at all except that you have a garden. We know that Berls has been shot. Tell us an anecdote about your life.” Nor is he the first to express this sentiment, which always takes me surprise, as I feel I have to rein myself in from what I perceive to be a tendency to over-share “Friends” at home generally dart glances at something else when one is relating one’s most intimate confidences, so one learns not to do it. But I “open up” and feel horribly awkward doing it. True personal things sound false when I hear myself say them.

I wish my students had been. . . what is the word?. . . more awed by this place and their time in it. For the most part they behaved as they would have back home, and though that is dear in its way, I was hoping for an experience to take them out of their daily selves. God knows I had exactly that when I came here in college, an experience unlike any I had known. What if one, instead of trawling the Pickerel for sexual contacts, had meditated all one moonlit night in the shadow of the Backs, or gone to King’s when not dragged there? What if one had undergone conversion or begun to write poetry? But the talent for awe is unequal, like everything else, and maybe it is better for most to be as little disturbed from their routine as possible. If nothing greatly good happened, nothing disastrous did either. We’ve had no disasters and none whom, at the end of four weeks, I dislike. I do hear that some of them have grown to be disliked by some of the others, though only imperfect knowledge of that creeps up to me. I have that hollow, unquiet sensation in the pit of the stomach that comes with the knowledge of the end of one thing without quite reaching the beginning of the next.