When I went to the interview all those many years ago, I was pushing a four-month old baby in her stroller. She was quiet throughout; if I remember correctly, she began to fuss just a very little bit at the end, but it was, after all, time for lunch.
They told me then that the program took about six years to complete if you go part-time, as almost all of us do. Nine courses, plus a semester, at least, for one’s final project. And then: voila! You’ve earned your Master’s degree.
Next month it will be five years since Emma Grace and I first entered the MALS office at Duke, and I can’t say I’m surprised that it’s taken this long to get me where I am. I had no illusions whatsoever that this program wouldn’t take me every minute I could give it.
But I must say I’m surprised that it has been– already– five years. The toothless infant has grown into a little girl who Absolutely Denies being little, and I have all nine courses (plus a bonus one) behind me. Yes, they are behind me: tonight I left my last class for the last time.
Okay, I still have a paper to write and some lingering work from last spring, when an accident forced me to take an incomplete. But the class attendance itself, the weekly commute to campus, the two-hour immersion in ideas new, extraordinary, breath-taking: all over.
I’ve managed to go out with a bang: my favorite professor obliged me with a new course offering this semester, and I have loved every mind-boggling minute. The literature has been rich, the ideas richer still, and once again new paths and ways of thinking split open in my brain. I would think like this all the time if I were able, if I could bear it. But it has been a magnificent gift to do so even on a weekly basis, to stumble reeling, brain teeming into the night air after hours of heavy-duty thought, my hand aching from taking pages and pages of notes.
And tonight was the last one. The class meets for a final time next week, but I will be away, and so said my farewells this evening. And as has happened almost every time, the members of this class have become dear to me. Some are people I have come to know over the years, but most were new to me a few months ago. Funny how shared reading, shared thinking, shared delight over the sudden and dry humor of a beloved professor can unite total strangers. And we are, of course, united too by our shared curiosity and hunger to learn: that is why we are in the program in the first place.
My friend Michael and I walked to the parking lot together this evening. We were discussing the trajectories of our final papers, and his suggestions for my paper set my mind spinning once again. I was glad for his presence, a distraction from the melancholia which might otherwise have afflicted me. Had he not been there, had we not been remembering the theories of Hannah Arendt and their potential application in The Leopard, I might have been quietly overwhelmed by how warm is Durham’s night air in mid-April, at how the buildings of Duke’s west campus bear a blue sheen in the light of an almost-full moon.
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
-Robert Frost, “Reluctance”
