4 Funerals and an Ending

Four departmental colleagues of mine have died over the past two years. All four were long retired, advanced in age and in waning health. I knew all of them, was close with most of them and was able to attend the memorial services for two of them. The funeral services were, as was appropriate, described as celebrations -- there was, after all, much to celebrate about their lives.

But their deaths have also been the occasion for, well, contemplation. Death does that, of course. But it does so in complicated ways. On the one hand, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to know that, for each of us, dying is what others do. As for me, I don’t do dying. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fully grasp that, one day, I will shuffle off this mortal coil. As Freud observed, it is “impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”

On the other hand, we have been told ever since Socrates that to philosophize is to learn to die. But does this apply to those who, as I do from time to time, teach philosophy? Consider, after all, the kind of philosophizing favored in our universities -- the sort, as the failed philosopher (and successful novelist) Julian Barnes once remarked, begins with a debate about whether “goodness” is like “yellowness.” More important, though, is the unavoidable and ineluctable humanness of professors of every stripe. Historians might pretend to teach the lessons from the past of others, but we usually miss lessons from our own pasts. Philosophers spend their days parsing moral actions, but they seem to me no better equipped to acting morally outside (or inside) the classroom than nonphilosophers.

As far as I can tell, to teach philosophy not only is not to learn how to die, but it is not necessarily even to learn how to live as an academic or a person.

Learning how to live as both, I now realize, is the lesson my departed colleagues had tried to teach me. Thirty years ago, when I first arrived at my university, I brought along a Ph.D. in modern European history. Through a series of accidents, the department in which I held a tenure-track position was not History, but instead Modern and Classical Languages. At the first departmental meeting, some of the department members looked at me, or so it felt, as if I had sprouted a third arm. They were not wrong: I was neither a linguist nor a literature specialist and, as an undergraduate, I had failed the only class I had ever taken in the language I was now supposed to teach.

Yet my recently departed colleagues all warmly shook my hand -- in fact, if the occasion demanded, they would have shaken all three. It is impossible to exaggerate what that meant to a struggling junior faculty member. As I tried to reinvent myself as a language professor, the warmth of their initial welcome -- whether it had a French or Italian, Russian or German inflection -- stayed steady and sustaining. All four were then in the primes of their lives: engaged in their work as teachers and engaging in how they spoke -- somehow simultaneously sardonically and sincerely -- about the teaching of languages. I valued them as mentors, admired them as human beings and respected them as teachers.

But there’s the rub. Like a blast of arctic air, each of their deaths carries a sorry and sobering truth: I thought of them as teachers, not as professors. Apart from dissertations turned into monographs, they did not write books and only occasionally wrote articles. When they entered the system, of course, the criteria for tenure were different than when I began. But I was driven to write not just to earn tenure, but also to leave a mark. If one had any pretension to professing, I believed, one had better build a high pile of books and articles from which to do so.

What about teaching and service? They were, I reasoned, les misères that accompanied les gloires of being a tenured academic -- the unavoidable corvées that dragged me away from what truly mattered: research and writing. Of course, those latter occupations mattered because my professional future hinged on them. If life in the groves of academe was idyllic, getting there was Hobbesian. It was, I muttered to myself, a matter of publish or perish. But behind this binary opposition was a corollary, one whose truth I took to be self-evident -- namely, that publishing also made me a better professor.

I now know, a few books and four deaths later, what I should have known then: a professor and a person can perish on the way to publishing. As I looked over the many filled pews at their celebrations, as I listened to the moving recollections told by their families and former students, as I recalled my own interactions with them over the years, I came to miss my colleagues in more ways than one. I missed their living presence, but I discovered that I also missed what their professional lives embodied: collegiality and citizenship, teaching and tutoring, being a mentor and being a mensch -- virtues that a pile of books, no matter how high, will never reach.