During the last week of the semester, I held my senior seminar outdoors. The weather was too glorious and the students too excited. Most of them graduate this year; settling themselves on the grass, they chatted less about what we were doing today than what they would do tomorrow. Bouncing back and forth their plans for the next chapter, the next phase, the next stop in their still-young lives, they were rushing toward the future and fastened on their life after university.
As I pretended to look over my notes, I instead listened to my students: I could not keep a tally of how many “afters” and “nexts” they were looking forward to! College was a passage in their lives, not a terminus. And yet, in professional terms, college was my endpoint. Of course, I could always quit my position and become, say, a beekeeper or busker. But let’s be honest: There are no “nexts” or “afters” left in my quiver. I launched all of them a long time ago, mostly with the aim of achieving a particular bull’s-eye: becoming a tenured professor.
And hit the bull’s-eye I did: Many years ago I became a professor — and a professor I will remain. It is, we know, one of the best of all possible professional worlds. As with Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, however, it has its drawbacks. One of these disadvantages, I now realize, is Commencement Day. A glorious day for our students, but for us — not so much.
Don’t get me wrong. We are, of course, often thanked by our students and their parents, and ritually recognized by administrators and their guest speakers. But the speakers always aim their advice and encouragement at the students, not their teachers. And why wouldn’t they? The lives of our students are linear, heading onward and upward in a direction that has yet to be defined. Like Buzz Lightyear, they are being launched into infinity and beyond: They need all the attention, advice, and applause we can give them.
Our lives, on the other hand, seem cyclical. We mostly recycle the same syllabi, mostly remain in our chosen specializations or subspecializations, and mostly review books and articles we vaguely feel we have already reviewed. Sure, we have every intention of teaching that new class we meant to propose, to add to a syllabus those new books we meant to read, and to begin research for that article we meant to write. Then, suddenly, it’s fall. And there we are, standing in the front of the classroom, looking out at our new students who — some prim, others pierced; some focused, others flat-lining — somehow resemble our old students, while discussing a syllabus that somehow resembles our old syllabus.
Commencement Day? Honestly, the event, and all that follows, feels more like Recommencement Day. Am I alone in thinking that we resemble, if just a smidgen, Phil Connors, the character played by Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day? Like him, our credo might well be: “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”
I know, I know: How dare I suggest we are all captives of a professional Punxsutawney, forever reliving February 2 in our groves of academe! Haven’t we, after all, just received a “revise & resubmit” from the leading journal in our field? Weren’t we, just the other day, asked to chair a panel at our professional society’s annual conference? Aren’t we about to set our guild on its collective ear with our transformational monograph? Or, at least, gain tenure in that same guild?
Perhaps this is working out for you. But as Phil Connors, who learns French during his long sojourn in New Hampshire, would say: je persiste et signe. I insist there is something Punxsutawneyish at least to my professorial life. This is why, just as students receive sage counsel on Commencement Day, so too should faculty members get equally wise advice on what, for all intents and purposes, is our Recommencement Day. While today is the first day of the rest of their lives, today is the first day of what have always already been our lives.
Clearly, the normal run of actors and activists, business and political leaders won’t do for us. Crusty and crafty veterans of the practical world, they no doubt have much to tell our students. As for us, we need someone with a more metaphysical turn of mind. Wanted: a few good thinkers who have wrestled with this fundamentally absurd datum of our lives, who have dwelt on this peculiar wrinkle to human existence — a wrinkle our students are too young to wear.
In a word, is there an existentialist in the house?
Friedrich Nietzsche immediately comes to mind. He’s dead, you say? Well, according to his theory of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche says he’s not. Thanks to eternity, all previous configurations in the cosmos will inevitably play out again and again, without end. This is, it seems, bad physics, but Nietzsche doesn’t care. It’s good philosophy — philosophy done with a hammer. Not only have we all of eternity to learn French, but we have all of eternity to relearn French: an eternity that dwarfs what felt like an eternity during our undergrad days in the language lab.
Put another way, few things concentrate the mind more than eternal recurrence. What if a demon, Nietzsche wonders, were to whisper in our ears: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more. … The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again — and you with it, speck of dust!” Would we gnash our teeth, Nietzsche asks, or would we shout: “Never did I hear anything more divine!”
Teeth-gnashing comes easily to academics; I ground down my own ages ago. But what if we instead embraced the notion of eternal recurrence? Practiced what Nietzsche called amor fati — wanting nothing to be different in our lives were we condemned to repeat them through all of time? Albert Camus posed this very question in his story of Sisyphus. Condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hillside, watch it roll down, then push it back up through all of eternity, Sisyphus makes this fate his own. This struggle, Camus tells us, is enough to fill a man or woman’s heart. Just as “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” come Recommencement Day, we must imagine each of our selves happy, too.
