For everybody who has been wondering where I am, I doing that ne plus ultra bourgeois activity, attending a writing conference. I will write more about this when I get home (tomorrow).

I had wanted to tell a story before I left home that had made me have some faith in the world, as so much of this site and apparently my other writing is mired in negativity and despair. Like many people I often do searches on the Internet for old schoolmates and other people I once knew who interested me, many of whom I never spoke to. I did such a search a few days before leaving home on a girl who had gone to my college, the sort of girl who when one was in high school he imagines he is going to meet everywhere when he gets to college, only to find upon arriving there that she is neither so common as expected, nor is he good enough to meet her and probably never will be. She was not the sort of babe that is unattainable by design, who enjoys having a lot of men groveling about her and competing for a thing they are never going to get. She was lustrously blonde, intelligent, mature, voluptuous enough to overwhelm the thoughts most men at age 18 or 20 would have upon approaching her. She would not have necessarily have won a swimsuit contest, but one would very much have liked to see her in a swimsuit, which one never did. She was terribly dissatisfied, as far as I could tell, with almost the entire life of our school: the curriculum, the faculty, the attitudes and beliefs, and of course, almost none of the boys, if any at all, held any interest for her. Some people speculated that she was a frustrated undeclared lesbian and so forth but I do believe there are some people (though I am not of them) whose dissatisfactions are not entirely related to sexuality. Nontheless she made one feel one's inadequacy immediately upon entering her presence, usually by refusing to acknowledge or engage him in the slightest. Despite all this she stayed four years and graduated.

Now recently our college sent to the alumni a new promotional DVD in which, contrary to the attitude of the previous 60 years, the professional and financial successes of alumni was given a huge emphasis, which is an enormous change even in the fifteen years since I was a student. Every graduate of the college featured had a high-paying and prestigious job. My problem with this is that there is no balance even to give honor to the life of the mind if it is accompanied by modest renumeration. No priests or seminarians (we must have one of the highest percentages in the country among specifically non-religious colleges at producing men of the cloth); no teachers or professors, though for generations the college has been dependent for its very existence on the outstanding quality of its faculty, none of whom are rich people (unless by marriage or inheritance) but many of whom have had such learning and understanding that they remained models of how to live and organize one's mind to students throughout life, though those students may have far surpassed them in income. No parents of children using the wisdom of their education to contibute to society that way of course, or aid workers, or forest rangers, or soldiers (again we must be certainly overrepresented in the military compared with other liberal arts colleges of our type) or people leading otherwise interesting but impecunious lives in every corner of the globe. All these groups just named are probably more representative of the alumni base than film directors, advertising executives, Wall Street moguls and lawyers depicted in the new propoganda, with the exception of the lawyers; the legal profession has become such a fallback for so many of my old schoolmates who seem to go into it more out of status desperation than an innate love of justice or grappling with the foundations of society that one has to question whether the college is succeeding in its presumed mission any longer. I seriously doubt that the founders of the program would be pleased to see it degenerating into a training ground for comfort-seeking lawyers, which must be the destination of 20-25% of graduates in the classes of my period.

Which brings us back to our subject. This lady I was speaking of is now in early early 30s, and is employed in a school in a very poor ex-Soviet country. She almost cetainly does not make more than $10,000 a year (I have worked in a similiar type of place in a considerably less poor ex-Communist country, and know that one does not do such a thing for the money). She appears from her writings on the school's web site, to be happy, to be among people she respects and to feel a purpose in her life. Halleluja! I am sad that she could not find such peace in America or among us; but I know that when I was abroad for a long time I was very sad at the prospect of coming back, that the interesting people and situations one encounters almost habitually as an American staying for an extended period in a foreign country, especially a poorer one, would not replicate themselves at home, that many of the qualities that gave me interest and importance when abroad would dissipate. I do not know if this is in what her happiness lies; I suspect not. She could have gone the lawyer or Phd route quite easily enough, used this to continue to hold herself aloof from people, and still been unhappy. Indeed I had expected it of her. I am proud of her and happy for the sake of our school and the advocacy of education for its own sake that she did not. The world is better for it.