Category: Just Life in General

The Final SSW, Jane Austen, Silence, Communion, the Abyss, a Full Heart… [and an Unfinished Title :) ]

April 16, 2026

[Note: This entry, a challenging SSW session (incomplete like its title), was written (predominantly) in class on Thursday, April 16, 2026, in my beloved Jane Austen class, when nearly all the students were present and writing in peace.]

Here in my final SSW, I find myself staring at the blank page. Many thoughts … no thoughts. Where to start? Teaching Jane Austen … has brought me in touch with my past, through Gene Ruoff, and so many other large significances of my world. We ended class Tuesday with a proper focus—a glancing recognition of the Holy Spirit as the non-linguistic substance of pure communication. In my conversations elsewhere I spoke of the grief I felt for Austen as a woman, and broadening out, for all women who have suffered oppression, and will suffer oppression, as we keep finding ways to undo progress.

But there are hopeful glimmers. There’s redemption, even happiness, in local instances. Like Anne Elliot, we can snatch a good life out of the buzz in our ears, the confusion all around us. As for those making the buzz—a vain father, clueless loved ones, a world of distractions and agendas, often unkind ones—we can live amidst it all, be of service to it all, reject and yet not-reject it all—and be there, and be loving and kind despite all the misguided and hurtful aggressiveness bearing down on us.

Like Kenneth Burke at the end of Permanence and Change1, I’m tiptoeing around the edge of an abyss, so worried. More nervous, perhaps, than loquacious. But yet, here I sit, in a roomful of cooperating fellow humans, who, despite great inconveniences all around, have placed themselves with me here, and write with me in silence. It’s really quite a remarkable thing.

What do I hope for the world? I want the peace herein experienced; I want welfare for all these good souls. Right now, I’m having one of those moments when, as it were, I rise out of my body and view, in a glimpse, the totality of eternity, and my role in it, out of time. How does all this happen? All this potential I have as a human being, a unique collection of cells in a soul that never was and never will be again, and that can be just about anything I choose it to be. At various points in my life, I’ve had this rising insight—this “spot of time” that my friend Marianne expounded on today via her friend, Wordsworth. I remember the first appearance of this spot for me was in fifth grade, when we were in line for something—and it occurred to me: my radical individualism. I rose out of my body and thought I was who I was… (not quite that, but something like that); I was unique; I could be me, whatever that was; I was existing as a unique individual. That entailed much—made me feel (even then!) I could start over, and do things.

Now, as I close off my teaching career, I have less time ahead of me to put all that radical individualism to work in the world than I did back in fifth grade. But I can still do something.

I’m grateful for the chance I’ve been given. We hang in the balance. Austen illustrates both how possible it is to overcome obstacles … and how fragile the whole endeavor is. If only, if only. It’s such a gift, what I’ve been given, what I can glimpse. I can’t go much further in the writing than this today. Possibly ever. I’m hitting the wall; there’s too much. Or it might be the upset stomach I’m feeling. Which also brings me back to Austen, as I imagine the agony of that final year of illness (read those letters of her in that last year, knowing what we now know; and then read that heartbreaking (but stoic) letter of her beloved sister, Cassandra, to their beloved niece, Fanny Knight). Poor, poor Jane. I’m grateful for the efforts she did expend under such circumstances.

I end the semester (the career) with thoughts of marvel, of gratitude, of frustration. All of it is suffused with grace—with mystery, with quizzicality. My students are here, I’m here, Austen is here. I hope we can continue on.

1Here is the full final paragraph of Permanence and Change:

In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made [sic] institutions—but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread—for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man [sic], there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men [sic] build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss. (Permanence and Change, 1935)

Tuesdays with Morrie

February 20, 2025

Whenever I think of Tuesdays with Morrie, my mind immediately goes to my beloved, now long-retired (but forever young) colleague, Julie. As the recently-released anniversary audiobook informed me, it’s been 25 years since the book’s publication. When it came out, the book created a buzz; everyone was reading it, including Julie’s husband, whose reaction was emotional. The book touched something deep—for him and for so many. I remember Julie saying—“But this is new to him; we live in this world.” Julie was not dismissing any of the impact of Albom’s book, but she did contextualize it in a way that has been memorable to me. I held off reading the book—in part, because I felt I would react similarly to both Julie’s husband and to Julie, and both reactions would carry their own version of heaviness or even pain. Other reactions threatened as well: What if something about Morrie as a professor, as a person, as a mentor would lay on me as a judgment of some deficiency? Or what if my connection would be too precise and worry me about the passing of everything?

I had read some of Albom’s other work, and I found him so readable and relatable. In beginning my journey into Tuesdays this morning, I learned that he graduated college in 1979, the year I graduated. So we’re connected, in age at least. Just where will the connections lead?

As I listened to the opening chapters, I was struck by the balanced approach Albom has taken to hagiography. Morrie immediately comes across as special, yes; but he also is presented as completely relatable. He’s a regular person, possibly scared; he’s larger than life, yes, but frail and ordinary too. In his “living funeral” we see something many of us have thought about, attending our own funeral. So even such distinctive episodes strike me as something not dramatic or heroic or extreme. The early onset to the disease, with the series of “ends,” all narrate very understandable progressions in the inevitable process, and Morrie’s reactions seem reasonable, both quotidian and poignant in equal measures.

My early reaction is one of gratitude. Thank you, Mitch Albom, for bringing us here, into the quotidian and cosmic feelings of things that the experience of death brings to bear. I’m just recently past my January 23-February 5 cycle, and so, thoughts of loss and grief are still with me, if mostly in echoes. I took some time today to re-read some blog entries of mine, and I’m struck at just how elegiac I’ve become. But Albom is elegiac too—in a way befitting Morrie, and in a way that might nudge me out of my current groove I’ve been descending into the past 14 years. Albom’s elegy no doubt is uplifting and epideictic about life in ways I have avoided or found impossible. But there’s something I’m sensing about Albom’s book already that perhaps might nudge me towards a new groove (is it possible to be “nudged” to a new groove? Isn’t a forceful shove/leap necessary?). My connections with Albom—his humility, his kindness, his awed appreciation, his registering of simple moments—have a capacity to nudge/shove me in ways that I suppose I guessed at earlier, and thus I avoided contact. I think I anticipated I would delve in too far—or maybe, quite simply, I wanted a little more of my own processing of things before falling under the spell, either of Morrie or Albom, as mentor.

I took a dip into my blog because others had been there this past week. My St. Norbert colleagues are embroiled in their Laurie Joyner days, and some have read my memoirs of SXU’s conflict with Joyner that I’ve posted, most recently in an “unsent” letter to the faculty of SNC. The entry I read today was “The Day Before February 5,” which grew out of two SSW sessions four years ago. It tells the story of Terry telling a story. He was rocking and swirling a bit in his recliner in the alley that day that Loretta and I delivered him his new recliner. How I enjoy the memories of that story, now multiple stories, bringing back my mother and Ang, and Terry’s unique memory and style. 

So, my first reaction to Albom is to think that maybe I can start pulling myself out of the darker strands of elegy that have consumed me. I have been descending further and further—out of good intentions I think—as though there were no other options. My good intention was to try to capture what was “true.” I felt the heartaches of my past fourteen years—the death of Angelo, the challenges of faculty union leadership, the woes of Joyner, the Trump experience, the elimination of the English major and humanities at SXU and elsewhere, the despair over the climate and the prospects for the future—all of it needed naming. I needed to bear witness, as I like to say so much these days. But Albom is pointing in a slightly different direction, which may eventually produce a diametrical outcome? What if we focus on something of hope and promise amidst the guarantees of loss and pain?

I remember when Morrie was featured in Nightline over a couple of different episodes—before and after his death, as I recall. So, I got to see and hear Morrie himself before any presentation of him, now these many years later, through Albom’s book. I felt the identification, as he seemed to be the kind of person, the kind of professor, I aspired to be eventually. But that was in 1995, one year before SXU entered my life, the year Moira was born, a few years into the Kevin era, and just a few months into my Ph.D. life-changing status of things. I certainly wasn’t ready for elegy then. I think so much of the 90s these days—all that nostalgia that Gen has made me aware of, and, truth be told, my heart breaks (ah, elegy, tough to let go), as the aura of possibility then was more or less absolute. So hopeful I was, and perhaps that’s part of the reason I held this book at arm’s length. Ain’t nobody got time for that. That time will come. With all the threats at our door today, I do think the time has come. I need the intervention now, and I look forward to my “Tuesdays,” in the car, on audiobook, as I make my way to and fro to my classes in February 2025, my penultimate February of classes.

“Of Course We Lost…”

November 14, 2024

One week into the new regime, and we’re all still here. So there’s that.

I have found my friends helpful in maintaining my equilibrium, so I want to be helpful to them. I worry about how hard some are taking it. 

Today’s help comes from a likely source, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. He told the story of his father’s defeat in an election in 1981, and the lesson Velshi learned as an 11-year-old at that time. The story, in part, is that of a father providing support for a son experiencing a trauma. In response to Young Velshi’s incredulity at the loss, the father said with a comforting smile, “Of course we lost; we were never going to win…” And in the explanation, he contextualized the nature of struggle and responsibility and purpose. The lessons speak of kindness, maturity, resolve—and how a loving authority figure can make everything right, or at least bearable, in the face of a devastating outcome.

But there’s devastation and devastation. What’s different now seems to be the stakes involved, the way the world seems to be at a precipice. It’s not just an “inflection point” as Joe Biden has liked to say. What has been called into question is the very possibility of “futurity,” the future of democracy, at least. It’s hard to talk of “setbacks” and “rebounding” when the stakes are framed in such existential terms.

Velshi’s personal story about his father was framed in terms of other moments of American history where people in conflict had no guarantees of success. He cited many “starts”: The start of the Revolutionary War, the start of the Civil War, the storming of the beaches of Normandy, and more. All these undertakings were entered into with no “clear path forward” (the title of Velshi’s essay was “The Path Forward”). In each of these examples, the people fighting for freedom did not possess the certainty of defeat that Velshi’s father had, but they might reasonably have felt hopeless, given the odds. They certainly lacked of context of just how much would be won by success—the motivation they might have accrued from seeing the benefits and possibilities of their victory, something, from our perspective in history, we can see so clearly. In the current environment, all we see are the monumental stakes of loss. We need to step back from that a bit, before full paralysis sets in.

Velshi’s guest was the historian John Meacham, and he, after complimenting Velshi for more than “setting up” the discussion, advanced the idea that “history is not reassuring” . . . but “it is inspiring.” So many of our past struggles resulted in victory and advancement towards the lofty goals of our founding fathers and documents. But the freedom fighters acted without a lot of certainties in place. These agents were not really better than us. The endpoints arrived at were not endpoints once and for all. And so, the process they engaged in continues under the watch of successors. The setbacks have been with us in every iteration of past struggles.

One of my stumbling blocks in accepting this election is my thought—my bias—that some progress had become baked in, settled once and for all. My bias comes, in part, by way of Isaac Newton who said, with pride and possibility: “We see so far, because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Progress is like that, right? But now, when racism wins, when criminality prevails, when sleaze is embraced—by so many and so readily, how can we see anything clearly ever again? 

But, as Meacham says, “despair is a sin.” We’re all in this unending process, and, all things considered, the setbacks are not as bad as they might have been; they are not as bad as what we have already experienced; they are not as demoralizing as what prior generations have suffered. We must not be too impatient in finding our way back to the top of the giants’ shoulders. We got there once, and we can get there again.

The briefest look at the struggles of the past informs us of our heightened current position. Our giants may be in quicksand, and sinking, but we’re still a high way up, and there are routes of escape from the quagmire. Our giants are really, really tall, too. We need Velshi’s father looking at us, with a smile, and an assurance that we can go on—that our expectations must be tuned to some harsher realities—but not debilitatingly so.

As I look forward to the future—with so much more education available—or at least information—I see possibilities for seeing farther and farther, and from higher and higher perches. Those loftier resting places may not have solidity beneath, but they may still be functional. There is reason to hope.

In that spirit, I will hold onto an old personal hope of mine, first experienced in 1993 at UIC, in the library, when I first caught a glimpse of the World Wide Web. I had just finished my dissertation, and felt free and unleashed for the first time in many years. As I walked among the desks of patrons, I saw the computers displaying Web pages—text and images displayed in ways that inspired marvel at the newness and possibility. Who were these people, and what were they looking at, and in living color? The Internet had been around a bit in my consciousness prior to that, but a qualitative shift struck me in a revelatory flash, as though in a religious rapture. The reach and transformative potential of the medium registered fully. I saw the connection of minds and the spread of knowledge and the democratic ethos undergirding the whole platform—all of it a game changer in the arc of human interconnection and community and knowledge.

The Internet (we now know all too well) is not a panacea, but it does unleash untold powers of communication, access to information, and yes, even education. The genie is out of the bottle. As we go through the growing pains of conspiracy thinking, the spread of misinformation, the hurt over lost privilege, the hardships of evolving economies, and more, we have opportunities for all the salubrious effects of communion and shared purpose—something, one hopes, that is always a promise in communication systems, beginning in that first and foremost one, prayer. Censorship can only go so far, and is doomed to failure in a digital world. As our communities experience more contact, the things that bind us as humans will be given more opportunities to be seen and known. The shrinking of the world and the infusion of information and the processing of our growing pains—all pave the way to possibilities of compassion and empathy and unity.

A digital shoulder may be less stable than a real giant’s—but all this shoulder talk is merely playing with metaphors anyway. 

I pride myself in recalling that Aristotle claimed that the ability to use metaphors was a sign of genius. But in closing, I prefer to let the metaphor speak more to our hearts than our heads, and so I’ll leave with an imagined image of Young Velshi on his father’s shoulders. And his father’s implied comment: “We’ve been set to win all along…” [Or did he say, “Love conquers all”?]

The Task Ahead, from the Perspective of Thanksgiving, 2023

November 2, 2024

Here is Jamie Raskin commenting on the state of the presidential race with Brian Tyler Cohen last year around Thanksgiving week. Though Raskin is talking about Biden’s record and appeal as a candidate, his comments apply, in my view, to Kamala Harris. Once she became the candidate, Harris has had to distance herself from Biden, and she has done so gingerly. I don’t think this approach is a mistake, but the result is she gets less mileage out of the incredible accomplishments of the Biden-Harris record in producing an economy that is the envy of the world, with record achievements overall that far out-shadow any achievements of Trump’s administration. I appreciate Raskin’s calm. I appreciate his insight into our “big majority.” In these last days of the campaign, let us take heart that the democratic agenda, writ large and entrusted in capable hands (including Kamala Harris’s), has so much to recommend it.

Tuesday’s election will be a turnout election. We do have a big majority, but Trump’s side, I’ve learned recently, is motivated by a moral fervor that will produce turnout. Until Raskin’s insights and calm take deeper root, we need to sweat out the dynamics he comments on at the beginning of this clip.