Poetic Justice Read Free Page A

ever listened at all those meetings this last summer, with lectures and seminars. We now have text courses, preferably in texts nobody ever heard of before, like Bulwer-Lytton and the literature of the emerging African nations. While I think of it, we are in the market for someone who reads Swahili, if you should ever hear of such a person.”
    “So mysterious,” Kate said. “No doubt there are scads of fascinating literary works in Swahili. But I spoke just the other night to someone returned from Africa. He said that in Ethiopia, for example, there are seventy-five different dialects, and that the tribes can only converse with each other in English. In Nigeria, I understand, there are two hundred and twenty-five languages, with English again the common tongue for conversation. Why don’t we train people to teach English in Swahili, instead of training people to teach Swahili in English, or is that a particularly reactionary observation?”
    “Not only reactionary,” Mark said, “but probably in itself grounds for occupying this whole building. Now as to the catalogue …”
    “Why are we discussing next year’s catalogue on this year’s first day of classes?”
    “As you will see when you meet with the student-faculty committee for finalizing the revisions of the catalogue, everyone keeps changing his mind, so that we’ve got to get the damn catalogue for next year into print so that no one can change it and we can argue about the year after.”
    “I am not on the student-faculty committee to finalize anything, and I will not serve on any committee with so barbaric a word as ‘finalize’ in its title, and that’s final,” Kate said.
    “The title is open to discussion,” Mark said, “but I’m afraid you’ve absolutely got to be on the committee because you’ve been on it all summer and are the only one who knows what’s going on.”
    “ ‘We have no means of learning what is really going on,’ Auden says.”
    “I had no idea Auden was so relevant; the ultimate compliment.”
    “Well, he may be,” Kate said, “but I’m not. Do you think that could be my whole problem?”
    “It’s the problem all right. We are not only magnificently irrelevant, but are prevented, mysteriously, from enjoying the fruits of irrelevance, which are frivolity and leisure.”
    “I wish I were an African nation,” Kate said. “It must be so comforting to think of oneself as emerging.”
    Kate had time only to dive into her office, add the mail she had collected from her box downstairs to that already on her desk unopened, grab the dissertation on Auden, tell three students who appeared from nowherethat she was
not
having office hours or consultations of any sort, and listen, with perfect impassivity, to the ringing of her telephone. Kate did not claim to have learned much during the previous spring’s disruption or the summer’s hard committee work, but she had learned one thing: it is not necessary to answer one’s telephone, One can always suppose that one is not there. This vaguely existential decision meant, therefore, that Kate avoided for another two and one half hours what her governess used to call a rendezvous with destiny. A nice phrase. But Kate had early on discovered (though considerably after the reign of the governess) that one cannot “avoid” a destined rendezvous. Rendezvous are either inevitable or impossible.
    It was by no means usual for the dissertation examination, the final examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, to be held on the first day of classes. In fact, like so much else now going on, it was hitherto unheard of. But the spring revolutions had meant the inevitable postponement of many doctoral dissertation examinations, partly because the Committee of Seven appointed by the Dean of the Graduate Faculties could rarely be collected (most of them were either wrestling with plainclothesmen at the time, examining identification at the University gates, or begging the