Momentous/Momentary

The conventional wisdom is that you really start to ponder time--what time means, how fast it goes--as life draws to a close, as the twilight years (or "golden years" if you're feeling optimistic) set in and you sit in your rocking-chair day in and day out thinking back over a lifetime that passed you by in a flash.

Well, maybe I'm just an old geezer at heart, but this has been on my mind lately. And it won't relent.

I for one think your twenties are just as good a time to be contemplating these things as any. You're at the starting line of what will be a lifelong race. Your last year of college you spend gazing out at the first few hurdles to jump. They're much higher than the ones in the practice course of youth, and made of hard-hitting hickory too. No more of this styrofoam jungle gym with lollipop band-aids. The race to come is all rough and all real.

Amherst's commencement ceremonies were held yesterday. Another year of scared/confident/well-equipped/ill-equipped graduates, many of them friends and acquaintances, were thrust out of the sandbox in one great banishment. Three hundred and sixty-three days from now I'll find myself in the next group to be launched into the rest of my life.

For now I'm still abroad. But not for long: there are four weeks left of term, and they'll go quickly. I am happy about that, I have to say. As much as my experience here in Oxford has taught me much (spiritually, emotionally, about the life of the mind, about history, about the world beyond the American empire--if such a place exists) the academic labor is often slow-going and tedious. I read an average of about about ten or twelve books and write an average of 3,500 words per week. Yes, an "elite liberal-arts education" in the U.S. is demanding--but not nearly this demanding. It wears you down. Well, it wears me down. By the end of the two terms I will have written about 55,000 words; consider that one typed double-spaced page fits about 250 words. Anyway, enough talk about battle wounds. Suffice it to say, my mind would like to lie down for a while.

And what a blessing it is to have two months of summertime for that very purpose! The past two summers I have spent far from California, the first in Alabama, the second in Amherst, in each case working. I'll be working this summer too--doing my much beloved copy-editing work for the Mises Institute--but I'll be with family and friends and not in a dorm room or cooped up in an empty apartment. In many ways this is my last summer, probably. Normal adult people live through summers, of course, but not as high-school or college students do, with considerable freedom.

The greatest tangible reward of the six-month stretch I've been based here in Oxford--and it will almost be seven months by the time I leave--is that I've regained some confidence in myself as a student. The fall semester back at Amherst I managed to do alright on paper in the end but struggled internally the entire time. I missed the first deadline of my academic career, and then my second, in quick succession, and in the same class. I feared for my grade, yes, but mostly I feared for my mind and how it seemed to be failing me. The prospect of coming to Oxford (Oxford!) a few weeks afterward scared me even more: how would I fare in what was probably an infinitely more stressful academic atmosphere?

I shouldn't quite give an answer yet. I'm not altogether finished, after all. But so far I'd say I've managed pretty well. Oxford tutors are fairly honest people; if you're not up to snuff they waste no time in informing you of that fact (unlike some American professors, I might point out). The majority of my tutors have taken my ideas seriously and actually seen novelty and innovation in them--and I can't begin to say just how much that kind of real, true affirmation can do for the spirit, for the soul, for a mind broken down by fatigue and dulled by boredom. Here I find that tutors are willing to search through my often-chaotic thoughts and find real value here and there. To have a world-class expert take a look at your work and discuss your theories and in the end give a nod of approval is quite a thrill. It has done wonders for me (and maybe it shouldn't; maybe I'm too reliant on others' approval).

One main result has been to show me that I have the ability and some of the (still very rough and very untrained) gifts necessary for an academic life. I'm not quite sure if that's what the Lord's calling me to, but it has been officially reinstated as a strong possibility. If there has ever been one profession that has called out to me, affected me, transformed me, it's teaching. To spend life exploring the dark caverns of human knowledge with that tiny torch called truth, while--more exhilarating still--having the honor of guiding someone else through that mystifying, stupefying labyrinth, is appealing to me more and more. Time--yes, fickle old time--will tell. (And who knows, maybe I'll have a lifetime of these free summers after all.)

From Oxford, χαιρετε.