Footnotes

I took Tori to the Portland State library so she could read some articles for a paper she's writing. She studies steadily, with a calm discipline that amazes me. Read her way carefully through two articles in difficult academic journals, taking careful notes. She's old enough to look perfectly at home in a college library, now. Gave me a curious twinge.

As did wandering through the stacks at PSU. Wandered up to the Middle English section and pulled down my only publication (Chaucer Review, 1991 -- "Anelida and Arcite: Anti-Feminist Allegory, Pro-Feminist Complaint." Check the big department stores and airport bookstalls; bound to be copies there.) There I am, in all my glory -- quoting in French, Latin, and Italian (what a fraud! I knew not a word of Italian). Making a trendy and somewhat dubious argument. But it was a good reading of Chaucer's poem. Even at my worst, I've always been a sensitive reader.

And my footnotes are -- still -- magnificent. The only genre I've ever mastered is the footnote. The magisterial evaluation, the wry aside, the six-line demolition of unworthy critics, the hinting at vast learning and contemplation held in reserve -- I had it all.

Odd that I published that. I had already given up on an academic career when it was accepted. I had, in fact, forgotten that I'd sent it off, when I got the acceptance. It was an early chapter of one of my dissertations: sending it out may in fact have been a sort of surrender on ever finishing a dissertation. "Here: there's a piece out of all this wreck that might be worth saving, but there ain't no book here, I know that!"

A vanished life. And one just blossoming. And an accidental, grizzle-bearded father walking through the sour book-dust of his past.

Not a past I look back on fondly, for the most part. Like so much of my past, I mostly just feel grateful that I escaped from it more or less intact. So much of my past is a tangle of false hopes and masquerade. Pretending to know Italian, pretending that I'd read all of the Teseida in the original, is pretty typical of my past. I'm glad to be in the present. I carry on my various poses and pretences for only minutes at at time now, rather than years. It's a sweet, hard-bought freedom.