Five
Would there not then be a supreme form of forgetting,
as a disposition and way of being in the world,
which would be insouciance, carefreeness?
—Paul Ricouer,
Memory, History, Forgetting
p. 505
A Debt to Myself
4 September 2016, 2:44 p.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
What I thought, when I began the journey, was that I was on top of my financial situation. And that was... the case. I was solvent, in control, debt-free, with a credit line of almost $90,000. Now, I called it “my line of credit” but it’s not like I had a private banker or anything. What I did have were credit cards. To be specific, at the beginning of my journey, I had six credit cards, each of which had a zero balance. The combined available credit added up to $87,940. It was a number of which I was aware, a number I tracked in a spreadsheet, a number of which I was somewhat proud.
Now was it my plan to put the trip to Canossa on credit? Of course not. Absolutely not. No way. I wanted to preserve the beautiful snow-white purity of my unused credit. I was going to pay for the trip with money I already had. That was obvious. I never even considered the possibility of using my credit because the point of the journey was almost the exact opposite of going into debt. You see, I firmly believed that I was paying a debt. It was a debt I believed I could at long last afford to pay, that after almost two and a half decades I needed to pay. A debt that had come due.
What kind of debt? Well, there are debts and there are debts. This wasn’t the kind that would have affected my credit rating. It was a debt I felt I owed myself: the debt I had incurred twenty-odd years earlier by abandoning a graduate program in Medieval Studies.
Back in 1985, after my first year of graduate school, my advisor told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever wanted to become a professional scholar of the Middle Ages I needed to improve my Latin skills. A lot. She recommended a summer course with her old professor. So I signed up for the course, and took a part-time job at the Waukegan public library. I figured it would be an easy job in a comfortable environment, just wheeling books around on carts and putting them on shelves, which would leave my brain free to finally master the difference between ictus and hiatus. Well the original professor, the nice old guy, had a heart attack, and he was replaced by this Romanian linguist, an individual who did not include English among his seven fluent languages and immediately removed all the medieval Latin—the only kind I was interested in—from the syllabus.
Meanwhile, the library was in a big push to finally close its paper card catalog and go completely digital, and I was one the few people in the building who could navigate their new computer system. In fact, it turned out that I could read and write Structured Query Language. So the easy job quickly became an exciting and challenging one, and my mind became a battleground between two languages: Classical Latin and SQL. By day, I explored the pros and cons of the ISBN as a unique row identifier, and by night I struggled with Cicero’s use of aposiopesis. Toward the end of summer, the library offered me a full-time job. The choice was easy. I took an incomplete in the Latin class and a leave from graduate school, and by the time I looked back, a few years later, all my academic options had expired: I had become a database professional, and was no longer a grad student on leave.
Sure I had some regrets. I remember one time, probably in the early 1990s, one day during lunch I was reading a new book from one of the medieval history shelves (I kept an eye on the 270s and 940s of the Dewey Decimal System). I think the book was about alchemy, you know, how even the most respected Aristotelian scholars, guys like Albert of Cologne and Thomas Aquinas, they all had these wild laboratories where they practiced “transmutation,” so now it’s an open issue whether what they were doing belongs to the history of superstition and magic or to the history of chemistry and science. Great stuff. I think I was even taking notes, there in the lunch room. Anyway, one of my colleagues, the system administrator, muttered a Brando imitation as he walked past me:
“I coulda been a medievalist! I coulda been somebody!”
It was funny because it stung a little.
Next episode: A Soul in Hiding
For the impatient:
Buy ebook, audiobook on Amazon
Buy paperback on Lulu
Or just wait for the next episode…
Share this post