“Fine,” Simone sighed, giving a roll of her eyes. She grabbed her bookbag off the counter and threw on a coat from the front closet. “Okay, bye!” she yelled, and then was out the door.
“You know,” Grace said, “she’s convinced you’re going to renege on taking her tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m not,” I replied, dropping a celery stalk into the now completed Bloody Joseph and raising it to my lips. “And another thing: I finally remembered what we’re doing on Sunday.”
“Oh, really?” She gave me a smirk that I could only interpret as an olive branch.
“Yes. We’re having people in for brunch — Jane Elton included. And you want me to steer her in the direction of ‘Sally and the Kitchen Sink.’”
Grace took a brief but longing glance over at the chaos of her writing desk. “Do you think she’d look at it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She’s not taking a lot of kids’ lit these days. But we’ll see.”
“Anyway,” she said, turning back to me, “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about it right before you went on the show. I felt bad about that.”
“Yeah, well. It was quite a thing to have on my mind when I was supposed to be routing Cheryl Sneed.”
Grace made a face. “So it was my fault?”
“I didn’t say tha —”
“I’m the reason you said that horrible thing to her?”
“Look, Grace, you need to underst —”
“Let me remind you, Philip, that I wasn’t upset about the brunch. I was upset because your daughter scalded herself and you didn’t seem to care.”
“Okay, I don’t have time for this. I have class later this morning. I should be up in the office finishing my prep.”
“Fine. I have to go to the Loblaws anyway. Naomi has a playdate early this afternoon, and I want to get back with the groceries in time.”
Wonderful, I thought. What a wonderful day you have ahead of you.
“Naomi, sweetie, let’s get your shoes on. We have to go.” She took the child’s near-empty cereal bowl, scraped its mushy remnants into the compost, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. She then turned to me. “Do you need anything from the store?”
I gazed briefly at my bar fridge. “I need lemons,” I told her with not a small hint of desperation.
Two hours later, I stood on Parliament Street waiting for the 65 bus to whisk me north to the Castle Frank subway station. There, in front of me, sat a Toronto Sun news box with my picture in the window.
Oh Jesus, you have to be fucking kidding me.
But no: there I was — my comb-over like a frond splayed across my skull, my red beard thick and untrimmed — taking up the tabloid’s entire front page. Alongside this mug shot ran a vertical headline that said:
“Penetrating”
Insights
on
ODS
Oh, please! I thought. Did my heinous remarks against those executives really warrant a front-page blast? And since when do Toronto Sun readers care about philosophy anyway? I couldn’t bear to take in the subhead, let alone deposit my loonie and read the entire article. Does the Sun even run articles? Isn’t it all just scantily clad girls and salacious headlines?
I turned away from the box just as the bus pulled up. As I boarded, I worried about the stares and judgments of my fellow commuters. Thankfully, they were few in number that late in the morning, and didn’t seem much interested in looking up from their phones.
“Freedom exists,” I had said, back in September, in the opening lecture to this, my survey course on the Enlightenment, “because it serves the interests of power. To understand this is to understand everything — from Herodotus to Dick Cheney.” A ballsy opening salvo, for sure, but one I felt necessary to establish what I considered to be the nomos of the period in which I am an alleged expert. That lecture hall teemed with a large congress of young people — still tanned and tank-topped from their summer vacations — who may have possessed, as a result of cultural theory courses or Mel Gibson movies, an opposite view: that the entire trajectory of Western civilization placed “freedom” in opposition to “power.” It was my mission to disabuse them of this fallacy; an eight-month pollarding that would allow sturdier branches of intellectual curiosity to grow. I knew that some of these students would go on to become vocal critics of the Enlightenment; others would end up as Bay Street biz-knobs; still others would resign themselves to a life packing groceries at the Loblaws. But I liked to think that I nonetheless laid down an explanatory foundation — even a subconscious one — of the culture we were all saddled with. The kids knew coming in what to expect from a Philip Sharpe survey course: the readings would be lengthy and intense; writing assignments would come at them fortnightly, along with two major research papers and an exam at the end of each term; extensions would not be given under any circumstances. And yes, I had certain trammels about cellphones and tardiness, but I made it clear that, in exchange for these limitations on their personal freedoms, they would be allowed to engage in a different kind of freedom: the freedom to question me, to challenge each other, to debate the ideas captured in their readings. They were here to be scholars, to be thoughtful contributors in discussions during their group work and in the broader class. Indeed, the freedom to speak their minds was the nomos of this course, because it served the interests of my power, as their professor.
I had been making great strides with this batch over the last two months. They had started out as a predictably costive crew during my lectures, and their early assignments were plagued by pleonasms and leaps in logic. Now, they could be counted on to volunteer answers to my Socratic queries; and their essays were sharper and more succinct, in no small part thanks to the efforts of my brainy, uncomplaining TA, Sebastian, an ABD (“All But the Dissertation”) fluent in four languages who earned his $8,000 a year poring over and improving these students’ sentences. What’s more, the kids were just beginning to grasp the chief tenet I wanted them to take away from this course — that the relationship between freedom and power was far more paradoxical than the current culture wars would have us believe. This relationship — while finding its origin in the ancient world (and how could my early lectures not pay passing nods to The Republic, The Nicomachean Ethics, and various Periclean bon mots?) — truly came to fruition during the Enlightenment. And far from being one homogenous groupwank about “individual freedom,” this epoch possessed codependent contradictions that helped shape the very core of Western identity and what we might still unironically refer to as civil society. Eloquent extrapolations on this earned me what I hoped to see across that sea of student bodies: nodding baseball caps, nodding ponytails, and, yes, nodding hijabs, their corresponding hand-clasped pens scribbling, scribbling.
Which made it all the more difficult to walk into that lecture hall on Tuesday morning and discover an atmosphere of unmitigated tension — airborne and palpable. Sebastian came bounding up to me from the front row when I appeared through the double doors near the stage and took me aside. “Sir,” he said, almost sotto voce, “are you interested in cancelling class today?”
“What for?” I asked.
He sucked air through his clenched teeth. “People are sort of upset with you.” I looked beyond him and, sure enough, I was getting the stink-eye from several of my young charges.
“No,” I said. “We’ll proceed.”
Sebastian nodded in acquiescence. I have to say I liked the boy a lot. He was going to make a great professor one day, in the highly unlikely event he landed a job. But he still spoke to me in the way that all TAs did — as if I possessed a sack of gold coins that I would give him at the end of the year, if only he was worthy enough.
As I moved