Bosphorus

An old green copy of Emerson’s Parnassus leans against Meditations from Kierkegaard. Both volumes loll in a cheap wine rack put on my desk to keep the towers of books below Babble. I brace for a new term, new classes, new students. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kierkegaard, Rousseau: I tune myself once more to sing their strange songs in this familiar land. The acoustics are tricky. It’s hard to get an echo, much less an answering voice. To sing philosophy is to experience a heady power, but one I possess only on pain of being in control of myself and of my student’s being in control of himself. If either of us relaxes his self-control, the whole affair loses its sobriety. What I hope to teach is an understanding, an understanding that comes so close to the student’s self that it cannot be acheived without becoming action.