Well then. How do I grieve the academic career I never had?
In part, I guess, I’ve started: just by talking about it. It’s wound about with the grief of American decline in general, of course: in recent years I’ve realized that missing out on academia was dodging a bullet more than it was losing an opportunity. But that only makes the loss seem greater. I missed out because I was autistic, with all the passivities and deficits that entails: now everyone is missing out. Mourning that lost future can’t be and shouldn’t be untangled from mourning the future of America.
So I talk about it and I dedicate a time and a place set apart for it. And I give the loss its due. Those were hard years, between leaving Yale and becoming a massage therapist: not just in themselves, but because I had lost my luminous future, and everyone around me thought I had not just lost it, but wantonly thrown it away.
Really: I just lost it. No power on earth was going to make me a good or even an adequate classroom teacher. It wasn’t a failure of nerve or an unwillingness to work (though there was no way to know that at the time.) Successful classroom teaching requires maintaining multiple foci of attention and shuttling rapidly between them: not a thing I can do. Elephants will learn needlework before I will learn classroom teaching. I once knew a distinguished professor who couldn’t lead a classroom discussion to save his soul, and he struck me, and my friends, as one of the unhappiest people we had ever known.
Anyway, all that is over: water under the bridge. Not just water. All the debris of the flood. Are people even going to read old books any more? Maybe not. Ours might be the last generation.
All the work: all the careful, painstaking attention, all the fairminded discussion that brought these texts forward into the light: all that going dark. Maybe Europe will keep the lights on, at least for a while.
So these are sad thoughts all, and they twist and turn through each other. There is naught that an old Ent can do to hold back that storm: he must weather it or crack.
But for myself: I grieve partly to let go, and to let myself imagine – not a glorious destiny, let’s be done with those – but some destiny: some engagement with the world that uses my fifty-some years of literary study, and turns it to some account other than my private edification. That’s where this tends, isn’t it? Because in the next twenty years there may be some region in between holding a chair at Berkeley and playing online solitaire.