Long ago, in another coincé job, two friends had things to say. One: that every academic must have a secret life, some hobby nobody else from campus participates in, a fancy car nobody from campus rides in. Two: that I was stressed out from campus because I wasn’t hiding enough.
At the time, I did have the “secret” life, and my colleagues could tell and envied me, it was a problem. And I was not hiding enough, it was a small campus and you had to be there all the time, that professorship was a very public-facing job.
So it wasn’t possible to follow those instructions there, but they are the right instructions, and they’ve been hard to follow here, but they can be followed.
The example of hiding comes from Berkeley. We were thinking of those professors who are in their offices with the lights off, writing by the window so that nobody will see light under the door and knock. Or who are always somewhere else, who knows where, the stacks, a library cubicle, their houses, coming in at odd hours and by surprise, almost ghostly, but living lives and working unperturbed by minutiae.
I haven’t had situations that privileged but I aspire to them.
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I always said my father wasn’t affected neurotically by the Depression because he wasn’t stingy or worried about money, but that isn’t true: his neurosis was fear of job loss (his father had lost a job in the Depression, but his grandfather and great-grandfather had lost them for dissent). He was terrified to lose his and he passed me this fear, which has done me little good since I am so afraid to do the wrong things that at some level I do do them, or fail to act at all.
That seems relevant somehow now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 