The Last Night of the World

Well, no.But on the last night of 2010, can I pause for a moment, a caesura of thought as the busy world spins onward towards that arbitrary dawn we have chosen to mark the passage of another turn around the sun, and just sit with you here alongside the river of electrons that connect and divide us?

I hope that you and yours are safe from harm.

I hope that you are well, and that you are strong, and hale, and that those you love are sound enough to take you up in sturdy arms and lave you with love and laughter.I hope that you have a life that is full of challenge, and joy, and the prospects of a bright tomorrow.

I hope that you will lay down tonight in the fullness of happiness and warmth, and wake tomorrow in the peace of contentment and the anticipation of the day before you.

If you are far from home, I hope you will come safe back home.If you are grieving, I hope you will find nepenthe.

If you are troubled, or seeking, or lost, I hope that the coming year will provide a path for your feet, and the prospect of a better day.I hope you fare well into the coming year, my friends.

Year's End

"Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow."

(Richard Wilbur)

Posted

I've just finished posting the grades for my community college class. It is the last I will ever teach. While I enjoy teaching, and the students, I loathe the time-suck that it demands, and I hate the adjunct faculty system that allows the community colleges to avoid giving real jobs to the instructors that they currently pimp out for convenience store-clerk wages.

I had a great last class; lively, fun, and funny. Many of them did well, too, which I always enjoy. Some didn't, which is the nature of what I do. I once read a long-winded whinge from a community or junior college English instructor in which his snivel was that instructors like us were the

"...academic button men. (We) roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”

Um, yeah.

Word, dude, that's what teachers, instructors, and professors DO. Not everyone can master the Next Level, and if the Next Level - high school diploma, associate's, bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degees - is to mean anything it is going to be out of the grasp of an increasingly large number of people.

And so in that sense we're not "button men" but sensei, the blind man with the staff that hits the younglings and makes them think, makes them quick and alert, makes them good - that is, surviving - swordsmen and -women...or teaches them that they will be hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives because their intellectual swordfighting skills are a danger to themselves and others.

That's teaching and learning and has been since the first australopithecene taught his kids to throw rocks.

Now, mind you, I do think we're doing a lot of this teaching and learning thing the wrong way, but that's fodder for the next post.


But tonight I didn't want to natter on about education. I just wanted to come to a full stop, a night's caesura, and mentally sit on the ground and think over the students I have stood before over the past seven years.I have loved some of you and hated some, too. You have frustrated and angered me, but you have also delighted me, and even enlightened me. I have grieved for some of you, lost souls you were in the howling midnight of a world you couldn't understand. And I have celebrated for the way some of you pushed yourselves high into the hills, above where you thought you could climb.

It was always a climb; sometimes a scenic one, sometimes a grind, always a challenge for you and for me. A climb worthy of us and our labor. But now I turn my back on the hills with no regret.

The light in the window tells me my family is home waiting up for me. I am longing for their silly laughter and their love, I am weary, and grateful for the gentle path down to the warmth, light, and love, knowing I will not walk these hills again.