The Hours

Time's Not Up Yet

A few years ago, I found myself on the Columbia campus.  I needed advice, and I had a friend who taught there.  I called him, and he was there, and could see me immediately.  There I was, and even though I was a bald man with patches of grey in my beard, I still felt like a blushing ephebe, an acolyte, an undergrad.  There was my friend, in front of a bucolic campus view. The shelves were filled with books, some of mine among them.  It felt so official, I almost expected to see certificates from medical residencies and accolades from New York’s Best Doctors.   I asked my friend advice, and he agreed with me.  “It’s what you would do,” I said.  I had an office hour, really an office moment, and even though it is something we associate with undergrad life, it is comforting to have them well after graduation.

I went to Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts college where extra office hours were baked into the curriculum.  Each student did an independent project with their professor.  The projects were called Conference Work, but it was really an independent study.  Advisors were called dons, and the Oxbridge term alluded to a place where office hours were tutorials.  But the Sarah Lawrence version was more therapeutic.  You were meeting to discuss a text, an assignment, but you were supposed to grow somehow.  I studied 19^th century novels with a legendary don.  He was such a chain smoker, his tuft of white hair, which often hung to his shoulders, had turned yellow. He was the holder of a chair named after himself. It was a year long course.  He spoke in a soothing baritone.  He made you feel like these books were difficult and long, but you would be ok.  You would pick a Karamazov brother the way you picked a Beatle.  You would not be able to stop Anna Karenina from going to the train station—spoiler alert: it is not to get on a train—but you would be with her all the way. Reading about her suicide would somehow help you prevent your own. Professors were called by their first names, and Ilja was there for us, as long as we were there.

Of course, literature doesn’t cure suicide.  People who make it have been known to join the ranks.  But if we could be saved, Tolstoy would show us what it means and how it feels so that we could become, like most of us, survivors. 

In desperation, Anna drives to Dolly's to say goodbye, and then returns home. She resolves to meet Vronsky at the train station after his errand, and she rides to the station in a stupor. At the station, despairing and dazed by the crowds, Anna throws herself under a train and dies.

We’ve all been despairing and dazed by crowds, yet we are still here.  Sometimes we need to meet with someone who will somehow help us deal with something, and even if we are not making a copay, and even if we are no longer in school, we still want to put someone in a position of authority.  If that someone is older, then we can defer worrying about the inevitable.  Because we know those hours will run out.  You only get a certain amount.  Once you’ve used your stash, that’s it.  If we plan ahead, maybe we check the box to be organ donors.  Or the ground could be lowered and we could be in the office hour of office hours.  Our childhood wish fulfillment could produce the ultimate professor, a deity with the ultimate form of tenure, where the dispensing of wisdom never stops. 

But I don’t live in that particular wish fulfillment.  Some of my most rewarding office hours have been lying in bed in the dark, listening to records.  Some of those records were made by Joni Mitchell, and I never got over them, so I had to write a book about her.  I told her she was my teacher.  It got a reaction from her, but not the same as just pressing play again.  Sometimes, we give our best office hours by example.

Just last night, a friend reached out with a crisis.  I dropped what I was doing, drove, parked, and in about 20 minutes I was there, and once we could be alone, we talked through it.  And once I listened and considered everything, it was clear that he was going to do exactly what he would have done anyway.  My friend is older than me, and there is something comforting in this, as if he is watching over me during my turbulent tenure on earth.  But now it was my time to dispense wisdom, or at least lend an ear. 

I have been a college teacher for an alarming amount of time.  Some students want that transforming experience that I had in college, that I still seek out and offer.  But most of them are transactions on Zoom sessions negotiating how to get an A.  I accommodate these the best I can, hoping they learn there is so much else. 

“All friendships are Titanic friendships.”  Mary Gaitskill told me this when it was clear that we would no longer be teaching at the same university.  An office hour plays on the speaker, listens at the bar, is in the novel, the poem, the play, the film, even the phone call, or the particularly compelling text.  (Some Nietzsche aphorisms are text length.) 

You could be having an office hour with this post right now.  You could have come in confused.  You could have heard a train going to a station, and thought about that Tolstoy novel, the one that Oprah got her viewers to read.  We all have our moments of bleakness.  The train rolls in.  There is so much more to do, so many more office hours to have, so many ways to be comforted.  In college, I embraced my mentors and appreciated every moment they gave me.  But I also knew that when the appointment was over I would walk out, and I didn’t necessarily trust the comforts of the campus, either.  I knew that in the end, perhaps there were certain problems bigger than I could have imagined. 

Perhaps I was right.  The incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.  Kafka said that.  I read him in college, wrote papers about him, and discussed in office hours.  But he himself was impervious to office hours. 

And yet we go on, like Beckett characters, even if we can’t.  Someone will benefit from something we know.  And we no matter how old or experienced we are, we still want someone there as a kind of mediator. Between what and what?  Between us and the other side. The real deal is waiting for us. Giving and receiving office hours is a gift. I have been stood up for my office hours, and whatever that student was doing was some kind of gift, or diversion, too. That student was missing out, just like a lot of people.

We will all miss out eventually. If your biggest problem is needing an A, bigger problems await. Be nourished while you can. None of this lasts forever.

Ilja, who taught me 19th Century novels while trying to reach me as a human being, died at 91. The death of an old man is not supposed to be a tragedy. But I wonder if I will ever be that soothed again.