FROM THE ACADEMY
441
MLA conventions, I found a kind of reckless delight in being confronted
by opposing conceptions of myself. Faced with irreconcilable periods of
my past (the reckless undergraduate, the cynical graduate student, the
starving doctoral candidate, the morose instructor, etc.) I would tran–
scend them, as brandy transcends wine, by distilling my own essence
and holding these friends of two vanished ages together by sheer exulta–
tion. But others have selves too, and they drift just as I drift from the
moment of the past when we meant something in common. Some of
us drift in the same direction, but most of us have to come leaping across
the ages toward what we were; for a moment we bask in the warm
fragrance of old sentiment, but there is a wind blowing through our
bones, and we stare at each other furtively, unable to imagine who this
being is who now stands before us, older than we would have believed
possible.
These things are increasingly difficult to face. At my last conven–
tion I was still young when I went up that flight of stairs; I am older
now, and I do not think I will go to any more MLA conventions, but
I only feel that way now. The time will come when I will again have
to explore the nature of my own life, and then I will seek the Mezzanine,
though each time the burden of knowledge which it carries, the sense
of being in a dark wood in the middle of a journey, becomes heavier
and more intolerable. How long can a person stand entirely outside the
frame of the painting, pointing out the ploughman, the ox, the shepherd,
the ship, and the dim legs of Icarus. One cannot live in a shifting
kaleidoscope of identities; one must at last be willing to
be.
If
I am to
let Icarus die, then let him drown, let him not be washed in sea-weed
on my beaches, let him not reproach me with the flight which I did
not take, let him not tell me how delicate were the wax wings he wore
or how the sun ennobled his flight, however brief, into more beautiful
regions than that protective curve of shoreline where everything looks
down into the grave. Can I love him while I deny him?
Such questions do not occur in the turmoil of the corridor; they
come in reflection afterward, when the convention begins to fragment
and you begin to wonder with which of your earlier selves you will have
dinner and pass the evening. The halls are growing empty when you
make last-minute hurried appointments with people who aren't quite
the ones you wanted to see that evening, but by then it is too late, and
anything is better than to be alone.
You descend into the Lobby with its tan rugs and its tan Christmas
tree that does not shed its needles. You feel some relief, because you
have a place here, a reserved room. You leave the mythology of the
