Between the ages of 22 and 30, I did something outrageous. I ignored everyone’s advice, I lit the match, I went down a dangerous path. I got a Ph.D in English. The year I entered grad school, I was told that about half of the Ph.D’s in English got jobs, and some of those jobs were at Alaska Bible College. (This seemed daunting, but it looks like a gold rush compared to today’s humanities job market.) Getting a job would be quite the achievement. Getting a job that was considered to be enviable was an even steeper hill. I supplemented my adjunct income and fellowships with freelance journalism. It seemed like masochism, but I could not be stopped. When I was in high school, even earlier, my father, who is still a full-time philosophy professor at 80—54 years and counting—told me that if I read the great books, they could take me anywhere. What happened was that I loved many of those books, and I loved writing about them, and I felt that writing about those books would make me better at writing about other things.
© 2024 David Yaffe
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