We try to pass to our children the notion of preciousness of time while they are still young and impressionable. As we move through our careers, “time is money” is never far from our minds. Seldom a day goes by when we don’t see people using their time wisely or perhaps unwisely. We have good days and bad days ourselves. Our parents age, and it burdens us that they won’t be with us forever, and every birthday may become their last. And when we retire, we soon comprehend that we are no longer productive members of society. Every day of our lives expends our limited resources and the resources of entire society which alas are also limited. Our lifestyle in our golden years turns out to be based upon that nasty actuarial invention, the mortality table.
We are connected to time in another way as well. Humanity is undoubtedly work in progress, and as times change, so do we. Our lives are shaped by the social conventions of the age we live in and its technological sophistication. Our attitudes, habits and desires are also very much time-bound. When we reach adulthood, we can say that the world we live in is our world, and the time we live in is our time. The opposite is also true: we are all people of our time, whether we like it or not. We belong to our time, and our time belongs to us. We comprehend it, the way we cannot comprehend the past or the future. A time traveler who would venture a hundred years, either into the past or into the future, would find the world full of objects and customs that are taken for granted by the people around them yet are alien to them. And one doesn’t need a time machine to realize that a thousand years ago, life was very different indeed and people lived in truly different times. There can be no doubt that a thousand years from now, they will say the same about us.
~~~
Her hair was now turning gray. She chose to disregard this, and he tried not to notice it.
In her late forties, she began taking on more and more administrative duties. She did it with her usual zeal and perfectionism. The weekend trips to her office in the university because more and more frequent. Peter calculated that between commute, shopping and various errands, she now spent on average 4 hours a week in her car, an inexcusable waste of her time. They had now been together for many years, and he had never given her anything truly valuable as a gift. He thought this was also inexcusable and bought her the latest model of the same self-driving vehicle he had in their garage. With this new mode of transportation, she would get into her car in the morning with whatever she planned to work on that day and say: “Pool” or “Office”. The car would start, and by the time it was out of their driveway, she would already be deeply immersed in her work.
She reached her fifties, and her parents passed away. Children they had babysat had all grown up and disappeared from their lives. She told him once that if somebody had asked her about the stage of her life she was at, she would have answered: “It’s September. It is still nice and pleasant, but the summer’s already gone”. He then thought: “What about me? Does my life have any stages? I guess it does, but there are just two of them: the childhood and youth, gradually receding into the distant past, and the eternal Today…”
~~~
After she introduced the Indian course, the department started asking her to mentor and advise graduate students whose first language was not English. Most of them went to high school in English-speaking countries; they weren’t all that different from other students. Sometimes however she had to work with individuals who acquired the language at a later stage of their lives. She never knew why they decided to pursue an advanced degree in it and never asked them, because she thought that would be rude. Peter’s best guess was that they intended to teach ESL courses, either here or abroad, and wanted to get more formal training. These students required much more time and effort on her part. They worked incredibly hard writing their papers and essays, and yet she kept finding mistakes that no native speaker would have made.
“It must be a royal pain in the neck to write in a language you learned as an adult.”, she told him, “I took French in high school and in college. If I ever go to France, I can compile a great shopping list and ask store associates where all these items are located. But writing something publishable? Forget about it. Even the first draft would take forever, and my original submission would most likely be returned with a lot of red ink on it. I would have to be very lucky to have an editor patient enough to help me whip the text into a passable shape.”
Peter replied: “Well, these people do not end up as students at your department by some unlucky accident. They understand what they sign up for and hope to make a rewarding career out of it. Think about it this way. If you had a twin sister who was also an English major, after college she could have decided to go to law school. By now she would probably be a partner in a major law firm, work more reasonable hours than you do and earn much more money. She could also have thought: “It must be a royal pain in the neck to deal with the crazies who want to get a graduate degree in English while still not being comfortable in its grammar. And to be in some way responsible for their successful graduation? And all that headache for a professor’s salary? No, that wouldn’t be for me.” It’s really “to each their own”.”
Things went from bizarre to ridiculous when the department decided to admit into their Master’s program somebody from Eastern Europe. Every year they reserved one spot in that program for a student abroad, supposedly to improve the diversity of a student body. These spots were almost always taken by recent graduates from the UK, Canada or Australia. Occasionally the department accepted somebody from India, but these students most often came from English speaking families. That year however, the program’s admissions transpired to be less competitive than usual. The chairman of the admission committee sifted through several applications that had been deemed passable and chose the one of a writer who lived in a small country somewhere between Germany, Russia and Greece. Some committee members found it on the map and learned something new in the process.
The chairman of the committee felt that his choice required some explanation, and at their final meeting told them: “We never accepted anyone from that part of the world, so if we are indeed interested in diversity, that would certainly be the right move. Plus, he is a bit older than most of our applicants, and his admission essay shows some uncommon maturity and sense of purpose.” The committee sent him an acceptance letter, and Peter started hearing all sorts of fascinating stories at their dinner table. “Gossip is an essential human trait.”, he once thought, “We must have learned to speak not because we needed to hunt or prepare our meals together, but because we could not live without gossip”.
The new student arrived in September. He looked just like an Eastern European writer was supposed to look, tall, thin and with a sloppy beard. It soon became clear that he must have paid somebody to translate that admission essay into English. He spoke with the thick accent straight from a spy movie, and he had very little regard for the articles. Apparently his mother tongue had no articles, and he kept forgetting about their existence. His writing was to put it politely, a mess.
The department considered dropping him out but decided against it. They had no tangible proof of an admission fraud, and sending him back home right after the arrival would not look good. They figured he would realize soon that he was wasting his time and leave on his own.
Then the newcomer got his lucky break. He met another international student, a young lady from England, and they clicked. Rather abruptly, his papers dramatically improved.
“Some people have it really nice and easy. The guy has practically just stepped out of the plane, and he already has a girlfriend here who is willing to correct his writing. Some of my friends spent years looking for a relationship, and their men are so busy they barely have the time for a weekend date.”
The writer’s new girlfriend was a complete opposite of him: shy, not really tall and not at all thin. They obviously spent a lot of time together, because his pronunciation became clearer and the articles appeared, although not a
lways right and in the right places. For a winter break, they went skiing to Switzerland.
“I always thought a Swiss skiing vacation was only for the rich. I suppose he knows the right places to stay at and to ski. As they say, the world is divided on insiders and outsiders, and when it comes to Swiss vacations he is definitely an insider. And by the way I have a difficult time imagining her on the skis, but probably it’s again just me.”
The Eastern European was indeed a writer and had a couple of books with his name on the cover to prove it. When he settled into his student life, he and his girlfriend translated some selected chapters, and he showed them to his mentor. She didn’t have much to say about them, and he was very frustrated. He said that the translation process took the soul out of his prose. She recommended him not to bother trying to translate his old works and start writing something new and preferably in English. When he left, she thought she would likely never see him again, but he continued his studies as if nothing had happened.
When the time had come for him to write a thesis, he and his advisor realized they had a conundrum. When he had entered the MA program, he didn’t know he would be required to write a thesis; in his country, those were written only on a PhD level. His familiarity with English literature turned out to be limited to a few novels by Hemingway and Mayne Reid he had read in translation as a teenager. Now, it was the time for his advisor to become frustrated. “I guess my next project would be an attempt to teach English to a Martian”, she said to Peter. She got the dean of the department involved, and he had a brilliant idea. The year earlier, another Eastern European writer won a Nobel prize. He presumably had been better known to the Nobel committee than their hapless student, but on this side of the pond, the reading public’s awareness of their oeuvre was about the same. The dean suggested that the thesis could be dedicated to that Nobel laureate. “We could then say that we try not only to increase the diversity of our student body, but our body of knowledge as well”, he said. “And what will that effort have to do with English language and literature?”, she asked the dean. He smiled and answered: “Well, he will write his thesis in English, won’t he?”
The writer couldn’t be happier with this proposal. The language of the Nobel laureate was similar to his own, and he could read it if he really wanted to or use automatic translation if he didn’t. According to him, the grammar of these two languages was essentially identical, and the accuracy of the auto-translation was almost perfect. He wrote his thesis, his girlfriend edited it, the department accepted it and everyone involved was relieved.
When the writer graduated, he went back to his small country in Eastern Europe. For some reason, he thought that without her help, he would never have made it, and they stayed in
touch. His English girlfriend returned home as well. They tried to continue their relationship long distance but soon realized they should downgrade it into “just friendship”. Needless to say, a new local girlfriend soon materialized, to whom English sounded like bird chirping. He continued to spent a lot of time on the phone with the UK, supposedly to practice and retain his language skills. Both ladies got quite jealous of each other, because neither had any idea of what was going on “on the other side”.
“This guy is just phenomenal”, she said, “I think if he had ended up stranded on a deserted island, the next day some young woman would have gotten stranded as well and become his girlfriend. And what do they find in him? He is not particularly smart, he has no money, and I am even not sure how good of a writer he is”.
He resumed his writing and decided to do it in two languages simultaneously. He claimed that this laborious process improved the native language version as well. Now he could publish his books in English without paying a translator. He found a small publisher in England, and they agreed on a royalty rate that would have been unacceptable for a Western writer but was just fine with him because of the difference in the cost of living. The publisher would make a run of maybe a thousand copies of his book and ship them together with a multitude of other books to bookstores all over North America and Western Europe, usually one or two copies per store. This way her European friend accessed the market of about 700 million people. If 700 of them would buy his book, either in a store or online, the publisher would be able to pay him, pay the store and still make a profit.
In a couple of years, he wrote her that he landed a job as an adjunct English language instructor in the best university in his country. He was the only person they could find for that position who had a graduate degree from an American university on their CV. At this new job, he taught math and physics students how to say their names in English and how to give a simple high-school level presentation in their respective fields of study. His superiors at the university were apparently very impressed with his teaching abilities and promised him that when somebody from the senior faculty would retire, he would be given a permanent full-time position. The system of higher education in his country didn’t have the concept of a tenure, but neither it had the concept of a layoff.
“We at our department are a bunch of bozos. We thought that the Master’s degree was for people who would be content with teaching in a public school somewhere in the boonies. And here we have a person whom that degree helped to became a successful writer and a future professor in the best university in his country. We thought that we had accepted a future dropout who would waste his and our time. None of our other students has gotten so much from studying here. And let’s not forget about his extracurricular activities, namely his girlfriend. And you know Peter what I find most amazing in all this? In countries like France and Germany, the English versions of his books are in the “Literature in English” sections of their bookstores! Yes, somebody may browse the same rack of bookshelves and buy the original Hamlet and his book. And one stupid lady you know used to express her doubts about what that guy had to do with English literature. In a way, he is now more relevant to it than she is”.
~~~
Peter turned 90 and became increasingly worried that a Social Security agent would show up any day at their door to confirm he was still around. He felt it was the time for him to retire his government-given identity. It had served him well over the years, but now became too old for further use. Peter transferred the ownership of Timeless Ventures to his Bahamas trust and became officially unburdened with any property. Then he called Social Security and told their representative that his father, an elderly gentleman by the name Peter who used to live at such-and-such address and have a such-and-such Social Security Number had just departed this world. The representative expressed their condolences and thanked Peter for letting them know.
A great weight fell off Peter’s shoulders. He no longer needed to file any annual returns and reports. He became completely anonymous, nobody besides her knew he still existed. The Peter who had moved to North Carolina for a job of a lab technician and then owned a house, a car and a bank account there was dead and buried.
On her 60th birthday, she had a huge party at her department. Everyone was amazed how well attended it was. Some retired faculty came as well as some undergrads who learned about the party through the grape vine. All these people mingled together and talked between themselves how fortunate they had been to have her as a teacher or a colleague. She was obviously well loved. After the party, she told him: “I really wish you were there. You could have showed up just once, and nobody would have suspected anything”. He replied: “Sunshine, you don’t notice it, and neither do I, but you look much older than I do. They would probably have decided that you got a new partner and started asking questions like: “For how long have you been together?”. And we would not have been able to answer “For most of our adult lives”. ”
Soon afterwards, the university gave her a chaired professorship. She continued to teach her Indian class and another, undergraduate class she really loved, but most of her time was now devoted to advising to graduate students, mentoring younger faculty and
to department wide projects. Their dinner conversations now revolved around how much there was to academic life that was neither teaching nor research. “Everyone around me is up to their ears in class preparation and paper writing.”, she would say, “I suppose this is what we expect from them if they are to get their next promotions. It’s just too bad that people like myself who don’t have any further promotions have to pick up the slack and do everything around the department that they don’t have the time to do.”
He knew her now for almost four decades, and for all that time, aside of their short vacations, she hardly had any evenings or weekends off. At first, she had books to read, courses to take, exams to get ready for and papers to submit before the deadline. Then she needed to prepare coursework, grade term papers and on a regular basis publish articles in referred journals. And now she provided guidance to both recent and future PhDs and helped run the department. Activities and duties changed, but the demanding nature of her line of work didn’t. “My life is a picnic compared to hers”, he thought sometimes, “There are trading hours, and outside them I can do whatever I want”.