For this last installment of Agora, volume 27, we decided to lean on our friends. Rather than write the issue ourselves, we solicited each item from a colleague teaching or writing or otherwise pursuing ye life-of the-mind elsewhere. Then we wrote a headnote declaring just how we presume to see ourselves connected to said contributor, et voila. The result is not our usual homemade sampler, but a marvelous crazy quilt of poetry, critical theory, art, and photography, stitched together here but imported from places as exotic as California, Maine, Connecticut, Kentucky, and Champaign-Urbana.

 

It’s great to have friends in high places. To name names would be contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, but guests at this exclusive little party have won Guggenheims and Emmys, have popped up more often than dandelions in “Year’s Best” anthologies, have won wide audiences outside as well as inside academe. They have performed their work on the radio, had it produced in Paris, seen volumes of it translated into French, and once traveled to Afghanistan to design clothing. In two cases they have appeared in prestigious Norton anthologies, in two others they have painted brilliantly and influentially, and in one they fought bravely for democracy against a government that jailed them for it. They have served on Pulitzer Prize selection committees and supervised the music arrangements for over four hundred Universal Studios films. What a fascinating, talented group! How nice to have them all together!

 

¾Especially nice, because one of the trials of university life is the toll it takes on friendship. College teaching commits one to long, long hours at work, in the office or elsewhere, leaving precious little time for back-fence socializing or Fridays with the gang. In this it is no different from other competitive professions; but more than any of them, probably, it tends to uproot the practitioner, whisking you off to college, then to graduate school somewhere else, then possibly to first, second, third, even fourth appointments at different institutions. In the process you learn a bitter lesson: that friendship, like language, is a gift very unequally distributed over the life cycle. At age 3 or 13 it is effortless, inexorable; at 20 it starts to become harder; by 50 it has become unlikely.

 

One result is that an academic department at a university has some of the cobbled-together, inorganic quality of an ex-pat community, say, or an Army base, or a refugee camp. If you are very lucky—on third floor Coleman we are very lucky, bad architecture notwithstanding—the people around you are genuinely supportive, warm, engaged. Still nearly everyone, unmistakably, is “from” somewhere else; and many are just passing through. A high proportion of the bonds that matter most are to absentees: the family you visit at Christmas, the ex on the other coast, the students who have moved on, the colleague now teaching elsewhere. You live and work in the busy, idealistic little world of the department, but sometimes feel more truly a native of a very different community: a theoretical village whose members are scattered over the map, convening to resume their interrupted conversations nowhere, finally, but in your own head. Given that the profession already over-commits you to spectral, intellectual concerns, the stresses of such mild continual dislocation can grow worrisome. That disheveled old guy in the park, arguing with voices? Be kind: he was an English professor.

 

But there are many compensations, one of which is the joy of periodic reunions: the get-togethers at conferences, on vacations, during sabbaticals; the wonderful way that old friendships can resume without a hitch after years or decades. There are letters, cards, phone calls, and in recent years, wonderfully, e-mail. Like Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey, you discover that you can’t go home again, but no, actually, you really can, after just a moment to get your bearings: and the return is all the richer for your wanderings. The preoccupation that kept you a little out of it, a little separate, while you were away now becomes the thing that binds you most surely to the here-and-now, the very path that takes you home.

 

And now I see that I am wrong to claim any priority or special susceptibility for college professors. Nearly everyone, these days, leads the same kind of scattered, interrupted, oddly networked life, and even if they did not, life itself is a slow sinking into memory, an advance into a condition where the mind is more and more its own place. (Just ask Wordsworth.) Worried, distracted, ill at ease, we look for ways to stay connected—writing, painting, composing music—only to find at last that it is our disconnections that draw us most surely together. The old ties hold. You really can go home again, and the old friends are still there, the old conversations still waiting to be resumed, still youthful and impetuous as ever.

 

Enjoy the issue, everyone, and let us know what you think. Special thanks to Joanne Warfield for the beautiful cover photo, "Afghani Girls" ©1977, 2001 Joanne Warfield; and to Stuart Balcomb for designing the splash page and archive. Go to

www.JoanneWarfieldFineArt.com to see more of her compelling photo essay,

"The Beauty of Afghanistan Remembered." Visit Stuart’s magazine at www.thescreamonline.com to find, among many other fine things, an interactive George W. Bush window that will have you hooting with laughter.

 

 

                                                ¾J.K.