April 29, 2014

Violent storm hit around two. The lightning was so close that in my dream state I pictured the food cabinet upstairs (which does not exist) with all the canned meats cooked and burnt in their cans. For a moment there was hail. The rain continues now. Distant thunder. Reports in Tolkien class last night, some excellent, some very perfunctory.  Reading my Humanities students’ journals. The same spread of the perfunctory and the sublime exists there, though not always divided the way you predicted. Some are wonderful indeed. Some are notes torn from a notebook and bound with a paperclip. One girl wrote persona poems for the great figures of history, like Gilgamesh and Caesar. One boy wrote at a fantasy novel peopled by the characters he’d heard of in class. Indignant girls. Tenderly reflective boys. The students seem to like me–one young man adores me– (though if they hated me would they say so?) and seem to appreciate that I restate the materials of the Monday lectures to make sure everything is comprehended. They praise my wit and the way my class is not boring, as they expected it might be. They like my narrative impulse, which delivers history as though it were a story (as it is) rather than a cascade of facts. Of my Myth lecture, they said either that it was their favorite lecture or that it “fucked me up.” I am joyful over either. All in all, if reflective of what they actually, think, I get an A, Humanities gets a B, and the Monday lectures get a C-.  My sadness over what comes next semester redoubles, for most of the point will be lost in professorial self-gratification. I do regret sometimes not having been political, not having served on this committee or that. It was a failure of responsibility on my part, though I thought my responsibilities lay elsewhere. It meant that I saw nothing coming from afar. In the past I had relied on gravitas to turn the tide against silliness, but in the case of Humanities (deliberately, that is clear) gravitas was given no time to work. Not exactly my fault, but my powerlessness is frustrating. The child conspirators gave their lecture yesterday. There is no doubt that it was fun.

Great roaring in the air. Pale light behind the rain.