I don't quite know what to say. What pops into my head is, "What a piece of work is man!" Absolutely the last thing I expected to hear was him responding, "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action.... Ah fuck, I forget that bit—is it the god or the angel?" "Angel," I say, "Then, 'in apprehension how like a god!'" He nods contentedly. "Yes, yes, 'The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!'" Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.
"Did you see much of the beauty of the world in there tonight?" I ask. "Not a damn bit of it," he responds. He chuckles, remembering more of the speech: "'Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither,' or at least none of the women in there."
Apparently between the Marine bit and the drunk bit he was an English teacher. I find myself wildly curious about this man. What chain of events led him here? I think about my own life; I should be starting a post-doc at Cornell about now, instead of doing this. But a car accident knocked me off the academic merry-go-round years ago, and now the brass ring is long out of reach.
I would have asked him, but his gentle snoring prohibited it.
Your writing is always a delight to me. This piece, "I used to be a Marine" contains a bit of regret, "...and now the brass ring is long out of reach", which reminded me of a poem:
A WALK
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Muzot, March 1924
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Warmly,
George
After reading your column I find this claim highly suspect. But please, write another column about how great your music taste is. Cornell indeed....
gl? Bugger off. My musical taste has nothing to do with my skills as a research scientist, which are now basically useless. OHSU, for example, might pay me all of $8 an hour to work in one of their labs without a finished degree. Thus I may as well drive a bloody taxicab instead, make about twice that, and keep trying to slowly grind my way through a research thesis here instead.
Oh, and do tell me, what do you yourself listen to that is a signal indicator of your intelligence? If you ever get into my cab and provide an interesting conversation to write about (unlikely), that will be one less music column to fill a slow week...
PhDs are a racket.
Make your own PhD.