Quite a scene it was. Watching him walking out of the small room packed with students and the entire faculty members in standing ovation, I wondered what was going through his mind right then. When the door closed behind him shutting the thunderous applause inside; when the immediate silence descended upon him in the dark hallway where he suddenly found himself standing alone; when he walked up those narrow stone stairs to his tucked-away office in the tower of this one-hundred-year-old building one last time, was he thinking he just left a life time behind? As a professor of law and literature, he spent his whole life trying to make sense of language, but in the end, he just put on his blazer, tilted his head a little bit like he does and walked out of the room.
I sent a lengthy email thanking him for the class, referring to my angry youth along the way, throwing in an excerpt of my poem for good measure and quoting Nietzsche in length and shit. After sending it out it occurred to me it might not be a good idea in light of what's going down right now in Virginia and all that. (I used phrases like "to the point where I want to just explode") And anyway it's kind of presumptuous to compliment a life-long achievement with reference to the undertaking and almost pretentious memories of a 33-year old. "One thing I want to say is time", he said in the brief fareware speech, "about 18 years ago I turned 50". It occured to me in about 18 years I'll reach the same mark. In a split second I suddenly felt very very tired.
--Apr 18, 2007
> 我来回应