Her heart has always been the same size as it was that long-ago Sunday when she first saw those eyes pointed at both ends, and she has always felt the same to herself. Secretly, because people are supposed to go through enormous changes and to mature, she wonders if there is something wrong with her, to feel such consistency between who she is now and who she was when she looked down into those alive-dead eyes. Is something wrong with still being who she was as a child, or is she fine? What book can answer that? A great number of them seem to the professor to intuit the existence of this question from her, however far away she is in time from the writer of the book, however remote, and in this context the right adverb to modify remote is impossibly. A great many of the books she loves most hold this question. It’s in there somewhere, the question, if not the answers, and why is it enough, in reading, why is it beautiful simply to find your own questions?
Long ago, when she was a new professor with a new professor’s keen motivation, she took the trouble to think of really good answers to certain questions students asked, and the trouble she took then has paid off ever since, because the answers can be revised according to the times, some needing more revision than others, but her original responses continue to strike her as sufficient, and form a sort of core around which revision can take place, and the questions haven’t changed. Really there are only twelve or so, at least in her life. Twelve or so main ones. Around those, a haze or shimmer of worries and intimations that can’t quite materialize into questions. Anxieties like droplets lacking the particles of dust or grit they need to coalesce into clouds. Things they fear. Questions she could not answer anyway.
In her mind she answers the professor who asked the question, who is no longer alive to hear what she wants on her gravestone, not that she plans to have a gravestone because she wants to be cremated and despite her fear of death is consoled by the notion of ending up as ashes—why, she’s not sure: their lightness and vulnerability to dispersion suit her, as does their incorruptibility, the fact that nothing further can be done to ashes, that in their lack of ambition regarding immortality ashes are the opposite of those eyes she gazed into in the museum. In her mind he touches her wrist and asks his question, which for all she knows he’s in the habit of asking as a disconcerting, cut-to-the-chase, what are you really like? refinement of flirtation, whose bad-boy contempt for the usual niceties at least some women would respond to. She had responded to the professor, not in the way he wanted, not with equal and opposite impudence, but with the awkwardness of needing to think before talking, an awkwardness despised at her university, which she mostly hid, but not that evening and not with him, and he hadn’t liked that, and hadn’t liked her answer, so they parted and not long after that lost touch and she was left answering him in her mind, saying yes, there was something she’d like, just one word, on her gravestone. Reader. And in her mind he loves this answer.
For instance, a student will ask whether reading critically and interpreting—by beginning to study literature—will cause the student to stop loving reading, because the student thinks there’s a risk of this, and that is what the student never ever wants to happen, and what is the answer, is it right to reassure the student when after all the professor doesn’t know how it will go for that student, she only knows how it went for her? Well, she says, in my experience, she says, the more someone learns about an intricate thing, like, say, the human heart—the more a surgeon knows about that heart, right?, the deeper in, the more beautiful the thing seems, and by thing I mean a heart or a book, either one. Then the student says thank you and goes away. But the professor does not know any heart surgeons and has never asked a heart surgeon if what is felt is wonder. She made that up.
Only when she is well away from that roundabout, safely settled into her favorite corner of the couch in her office—when a new student plunks down in that corner, it’s a problem—only in this quiet, narrowing her pointed eyes in pleasure in an interval of aloneness she has no right to, because they should be here, the students, they’ve said they’re going to come by and one of them will knock on the door at any second, meaning the value of this interval, the preface to losing oneself in a book, is heightened by her awareness of its likely end—only in the particular space created by unexpected liberty (in which thinking her own thoughts has a stolen or illegitimate savor, really fun) does she intuit the real reason for her love of standing absolutely still in the bicycle onslaught, in the student whirlwind. As usual the real reason has been expertly swaddled in and obscured by false, lesser reasons, very attractive in and of themselves. Oh yes there is pleasure in being unmoved in the midst of an every-which-way assault. But also, this is like her life. They come at her from every direction! They never touch her! No. That’s not it, not the bottommost layer, not the meaning revealed only when other meanings are peeled away, whose existence you only ever discover if peeling is a habit, if you love this deft quiet work of lifting away length of gauze after length of gauze to find the true face. Down down down down down and down. They mean something, these almost-winged cyclists, in their seriousness and lightness, their concentration, in their searchingness that must discern every tiny signal or else, in their absorption. This is reading. No wonder she loves standing there: in the middle of a steady cascade of virtuoso reading on which everything depends.
It could be, the professor tells herself, that apart from your work and your teaching you do not have enough going for you, that you need to get out more, that due to your aloneness, which we’re not going to call loneliness because it’s not that—it’s a deliberate, cultured, desirable, nonnegotiable state, absolutely necessary if you want to get work done, intelligent aloneness, good aloneness; it has a point!—because you are alone, conceivably your students matter too much. At least you have to ask yourself once in a while, you have to check in regarding whether or not it is wrong, what you feel for them, the students. Without fail you need to recognize that the easiest transition love ever makes is into coercion, and that your most useful trait as far as students are concerned is disinterestedness. You’ve said often enough that you love teaching, but you have never said the truer thing, which is that you love your students, because it would only worry everyone to hear it, it would worry even you, and it might not even be true, because there is, remember, the risk that aloneness has exaggerated what you feel for them. Which may not be love, but some minor, teacherly emotion that nobody ever bothered to give a name. Who were they, the people who figured out what the emotions were, and how many of them would be recognized and named, and which sad little shadings or gradations could safely be ignored—who were they, these feeling-namers and numberers, and what did they have against shades of gray?
The students rarely embark on a difficult or painful subject without some sort of rhetorical exit strategy. There is almost no sorrow they can’t disown with an immediate laugh. In that case—in the case of a quick student laugh—the professor is not supposed to know that she has been permitted to glimpse serious emotion. After many years as a professor it still strikes her as unnatural that students, that people fear what she might think: who the fuck is she? But they watch her eyes for what she’s thinking. Will she say something actually useful to them, or something they in their desperation (because sometimes it is desperation) can twist into usefulness, which will be more useful for seeming to have come from her, the professor? What can she tell them about what comes next?