But now — not last week, nor the week before, nor any week before that since December– I have time off to take things to Kinko’s, to pick things up at Kinko’s, to deliver them at the university when it is open.

And I’ll admit that, despite the Incredible Inconvenience of this process, I am glad that here is a situation when paper– actual paper– must be delivered in person, by hand, rather than shot electronically through the ether to invisible persons at the other end. I respect the page.

So, yes, I called Kinko’s. How long does it take you to spiral bind things, I wanted to know?

How many pages is it, he wanted to know.

About seventy, I told him.

He paused. You need it copied, too? he asked.

And the answer to this is yes, as the laptop on which my thesis is saved is not yet compatibilitied with our Very Annoying home printer. I’ll be saving the thesis to one of those little memory key things that connect with the laptop and then taking that oh so carefully to Kinko’s.

Yes, I told him. I’ll need it copied, too.

Pause.

I should be able to have that for you by Tuesday, he said.

Oh. No.

Because the thesis needed to be in at the office weeks ago and I haven’t time during the course of a regular day to go over to Kinko’s and pick something up and then take it to Duke while it is open which would mean I’d have to do this over the course of two days if you see what I mean and an isolated errand on any given day after a full day of teaching is enough to exhaust me as it is without having to do Two Separate Errands on Two Separate Days and a visit to Duke would definitely be two errands anyway because I do so want to see my professor.

Tuesday? Really?

No, he said. I’m kidding. We could have that for you, he said, in about half an hour.

Oh. Ha ha. I see. It was a joke. Just a little joke.

(laughing)

But maybe making jokes is his method for survival, or for helping customers cope. I mean, he probably never has stressed-out, time-pressured people coming to see him on a regular basis. Almost never, anyway.

(phew)

The post Terror in the Afternoon appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

This is Great News, as tuition at that fine institution is No Small Amount of Money.

The good people at my program have granted me a scholarship every semester of my tenure at Duke, and there have been Many Semesters. This scholarship has been important in enabling me to continue with my degree. It has, in fact, been Crucial.

And today, in my Duke e-mail, I received a message from the director of my program. “Congratulations,” she wrote, and went on to tell me that the committee in charge of evaluating Master’s thesis proposals has approved my proposal, which means, very simply, that All Systems Are Go.

I wrote my proposal before I left for Kenya and then, on my return, made a few editorial changes and submitted it, on schedule, June 29th. I have wondered More Than Once how it might be received.

And now I know. I may proceed with my project as defined in the proposal, and Duke is even going to give me some money to do it.

I am– in all honesty– So Grateful.

All I need now is Time.

The post Home Stretch appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

There is Absolutely No Parking for people like me on a weekday, so I parked in the Gardens lot and then walked through the Gardens to get to the Allen Building, which houses so much that is important to the University, including, during his office hours, my professor.

The hillside next to the parking lot was Absolutely Yellow with daffodils, and also with pansies in shades of lavender. The sky was a shade of blue that UNC could only wish for, and the temperature was that early, warm spring variety– the kind when you really aren’t certain that you need your coat. There was the ancient smell of boxwood and the crunch of the sandy gravel under my feet; the roses in their beds showed signs of waking: new and ruddy leaves are just beginning to show at the ends of the short canes. And there, just past the gazebo, a few of the trees were in bloom.

My professor’s office has an extensive bank of paned and mullioned windows that look out onto the quad and chapel, and throughout our meeting campus sounds drifted up to make background noise for our conversation.

And the conversation. We talked for Over An Hour about Joseph and His Brothers, this book that asks for so much focus and concentration, that deserves so much more of my time than I can seem to give it. We talked about history and time and memory, about Mann’s life experience and the specific and dreadful years he gave to writing this book, about how, perhaps, this book was the means of his survival. We read passages aloud; we wondered about their weight and meaning; we marveled at the genius that could produce this.

And then I walked back, past the daffodils and crocii, through the fragrance of the boxwood, and back to the campus where I am spending all my days.

We all have our favorite things. When asked, we can likely list them. But it’s Another Thing Entirely, isn’t it? when we actually get to Do something that we Really Really Like.

I like to talk– seriously and deeply– about Really Good Books. Oh my, yes.

The post Bookish appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has been – I am not kidding — an amazing experience. No, the daily-ness of it hasn’t amazed me. It has been nothing like convenient to have, almost all the time, pressing reading and writing assignments leering over my shoulder. While other stay-at-home moms might finish their laundry folding and leaf through a magazine before bed, I’m lying awake trying to finish reading this essay by Freud or Walter Benjamin. I let all my magazine subscriptions run out Long Ago.

And the actual attending of classes—arranging with Bill the childcare, making sure I get the children where they need to go and getting to class on time and (greatest miracle) finding a parking place—has been, from time to time, an aggravation or, at the very least, Something Else to do on a weeknight.

But, really. This program has been Amazing. And I cannot tell you, here in this brief (?) posting how it has been amazing. I can only tell you that, over the last five years, it feels as though someone has peeled off the top of my head, and Made Room, changed my thinking and expanded it, and given me So Much More to think about. I am changed, and I am grateful.

The professor I have now is hands-down my favorite. I stumbled into his first course offering when I got bumped off the Internet during registration, and this was one of the most serendipitous accidents I’ve known (never judge a misfortune at first glance). He is German with a gentle accent and a really phenomenal vocabulary. In truth, I spend a significant amount of time during his class writing vocabulary words in the margins of my notes. Words like “instantiation” and “inchoate,” words that express Far More in their few syllables than I, in strings and strings of syllables, can even comprehend. And my professor’s German-to-English skills really boggle the mind. Do you know anyone—Anyone?—who can read Nietzsche in the German and translate it aloud, as he goes, into English? You know, when you are taking notes, you are not supposed to write, word for word, what the speaker is saying. But this man’s syntax, his vocabulary, border on the poetic. I do take notes word-for-word in his class, when I can. I Do. Because it’s just That Beautiful.

This is my third class with this professor, this genius. And he has, happily, agreed to work with me and serve as my advisor for my thesis project; this, because he hasn’t yet discovered my Inferior Intelligence.

All three of the courses I’ve had with him have been about modernism. With multiple references to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and even Wagner, we’ve plumbed the depths of modern man’s despair, of man’s decadence, of the shifting terrain of modern living in the literature of George Eliot, Goethe, and Thomas Mann.

Yes, Thomas Mann. This writer of whom I’d barely heard five years ago has been the subject of serious study for me lately. He was a stellar writer, and has taught me much about irony and philosophy even as he has laid out, again and again, plots and characters intricate, delicate and glorious. I love it.

My Masters thesis, in fact, will be on Mann and memory, memory and Mann in Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. I am looking forward to it.

For Wednesday’s class, I am preparing a paper on the role of memory in his Buddenbrooks. And I also have to finish reading (about 150 pages to go) Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.

I spent much of Friday evening on research for the Buddenbrooks essay. I spent more time on it yesterday afternoon, and last night read about 60 pages of the Roth novel. I thought, after I was ready for bed, that I’d get a few more pages in.

But when it came to it, I couldn’t pick up the Roth or the Mann again. Nope. Just couldn’t do it.

Because although both of these books are brilliantly written (and who doesn’t read for the writing—really), although they flesh out some philosophical ideas and practical realities that are intriguing, they are also… well, Sad.

I realized, as I climbed into bed, that I was tired of early twentieth century Europe on the brink of World War I. I was tired of decline and mental lassitude and bourgeois misery. Yes I Was.

And what does one do in circumstances such as these? Simple. One goes home. To Annie Dillard (oh my, yes) and Pittsburgh (ah!) and Life Through Words in ways that defy words for explanation.

She knows, Annie does, what it means to be alive, and to attend to that living. One can’t live—not all the time—in pre-WWI Europe. No. It’s good, from time to time, to come Home.

In the living room the mail slot clicked open and envelopes clattered down. In the back room, where our maid, Margaret Butler, was ironing, the steam iron thumped the muffled ironing board and hissed. The walls squeaked, the pipes knocked, the screen door trembled, the furnace banged, and the radiators clanged. This was the fall the loud trucks went by. I sat mindless and eternal on the kitchen floor, stony of head and solemn, playing with my fingers. Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

-Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Thank you again, Annie, for the rescue.

The post Masters Thoughts appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.