This time of year always makes me feel deracinated, which is
to say uprooted. There is a seemingly
endless series of holidays, when there is no mail, stores are closed, and the
TV is disrupted, all of it punctuated by my birthday. The daylight dwindles to an annual minimum,
even here in the south it is cold, and worst of all, school is out. At the age of two my parents sent me to the Sunnyside
Progressive School in Astoria, Queens [this was four years before Stalin had Trotsky
murdered, a crime that tore the school apart], and for the next seventy-two
years my inner calendar was governed by the tempos of academia. Christmas and New Year’s Day were for me the
middle of the year, not the end of the old and the beginning of the new. My annual pocket datebooks, courtesy of the
Harvard Coop, even began in June and ended in October, an arrangement that struck
me as so natural that I was startled to discover that Susie’s datebooks start
in January and end in December.
Twelve years ago, I retired, calling it quits after half a
century. When the next September rolled
around, I could feel my juices stirring, only to realize in dismay that I had
no classes to meet, no syllabi to draft, no students to welcome. Ever since, I have been trying one way or
another to get back into the classroom. For
the first several years, I taught in Duke University’s Learning in Retirement
program, but that was not really the same thing. I started and ran this blog, and I even spent
a year as an unpaid volunteer at Bennett College in Greensboro, under the guidance
of my old Afro-Am Chair Esther Terry, who was Bennett’s Acting President.
Twice, I had the opportunity to teach a course at UNC Chapel
Hill, once in the Public Policy doctoral program and once in the Philosophy
Department. Both were wonderful returns
to the classroom, but that, it seemed, was that. Desperate to continue teaching, I even
recorded and posted on YouTube thirty lectures on several different subjects.
Then, three years ago, My son Tobias and his good friend
Peter Pazziglini conspired to get me elected to Columbia University’s Society
of Senior Scholars, and a year later, I began co-teaching a course at Columbia
with my old student and friend Todd Gitlin, who had somehow transitioned from a
youthful radical, the third president of SDS, into a distinguished much
published senior professor and Director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism’s
doctoral program. I was back!
The second go-round of our course has now ended, and I await
the very last paper before we submit the grades and close the books on
Sociology GU6400. In two weeks and a bit
more, I shall start teaching Philosophy 471 [“Karl Marx’s Critique of
Capitalism”] in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department. This academic year, I actually have what the
elite sector of American higher education considers a half-time teaching load.
How long can this continue?
On this, my very last day as an eighty-five year old, the only
reasonable answer is, Who knows? There
is but one thing more to say, and Dylan Thomas said it best:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green
bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I
pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
10 comments:
Chomsky is 91 and still teaching. I have no idea how many courses he teaches, but from
what I can see in his recent videos, his mind is still ultra-sharp, although he is a bit hard of hearing and needs help handling the steps up to the podium.
So if we use Chomsky as a marker, you have at least 5 more years as a professor.
Thank you so much for the Kant courses. And when they are done, there's Marx. I have "Moneybags" which I read a lifetime ago. All of which is to give you a heartfelt Thank You.
You are so welcome. They were a geat pleasure to record.
Best wishes for a happy birthday. I have learned much from your books and your blog. You are a national treasure.
If Boswell is to be believed, in documenting his last interview of Hume, there is the possibility of complacency in the face of the inevitable, no matter how discouraging the times. Johnson dismissed Boswell's account of this meeting---suggesting that Hume, "had a vanity about being thought easy". Your's is (not merely was) a wonderfully encouraging and inspiring life. Surely some solace there. Still,regardless of Hume's final disposition, one respects the fact that you have not the vanity of wanting to be thought "easy". "Rage, rage against the dying of the light".
There was too much malaise & childishness in my last post, so I think I'll get rid of it. Happy 86th Birthday, Dr. Wolff! That was the point I should of stuck with originally, instead of beating around the bush like I did.
I know that at sixty-three I am one of the youngest of the regular commentators on this blog so I hesitate to lecture my seniors about death and how to face it , but I have to say that I disagree with Dylan Thomas (who died at only 39). Here's why
‘Rage Rage against the dying of the light?’
Yes - if there were a God who made it die
Then rage might be the righteous just response.
A God who makes the marvel of a man
Only to wreck him bit by squalid bit
We might well rage against so cruel a God
Who makes only to mar his handiwork
Killing his creatures piecemeal by degrees.
But if there is no God, no hidden hand
Whose handiwork we are; if minds emerge
From undirected mindlessness, who then
Should be the target of our ageing rage?
There is no one to rage against; no mind
Who made us great only to bring us down.
Anger at nothing, anger at no one
Consumes the remnant of our fading days
In raging against deeds without a doer
(Which therefore do not qualify as deeds)
Deprives us now of joys we yet might taste
Poisoning pleasures still within our reach.
Fists shaken at the all unknowing void
Cannot be used to work what good we may
To make the world a better place for minds
(Our own and those we love or care about )
So do not rage against the dying light
Rather make what use of it you can
Do not despise the sunset but make hay
Whilst red and gold illuminate the land
Perhaps as twilight deepens there ’s a chance
Of love to feel or one last thing to do
Don’t waste last chances, don’t waste the last light
In rage against the light because it’s last
And if for you the twilight is too bleak
And nothing trumps the somethings that remain
Then DO go gentle into that good night
(First thanking those who brought what good there was)
Walk through death’s door to darkness, head held high.
Rage is a waste for we were born to die.
If there's no god and no hidden hand and minds emerge from undirected mindlessness, why not rage if that's what you feel like doing?
Why assume that rage is a waste? Since as you point out, there's no god, no master plan, etc., what's waste for you may not be waste for me and vice versa.
The verb's etymology tells me raging is not necessarily a bad thing, e.g., "to romp, frolic, to behave wantonly (c1201), to move, fidget, to become agitated..." I myself often fidget, am often agitated, yet rarely frolic or behave wantonly, but I sure as hell wouldn't mind doing so.
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