Before it's too late...

This semester I'm taking a seminar on Vladimir Nabokov's fiction with David Walker (a fabulous professor who has influenced numerous blogs and students alike), and one of our readings included The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Coincidentally, the introduction was written by none other than Michael Dirda, an Oberlin alumnus and Pulitzer-prize winning critic, and whose son overlapped with me at Oberlin. His magnificent introduction prompted me, upon returning home to DC for spring break, to dig out from our basement the book Readings, Dirda's collection of "essays and literary entertainments" from the 1990s. I opened to a page at random and read this:

Yes! So true! Except I usually don't eat breakfast in Dascomb, I tend to go for DeCafe. But otherwise, this sentence pretty much hits the nail on the head. I was thrilled to find Oberlin in the first six words I read of the book, and had to continue:

An odd sensation overcame me upon reading this passage. It was like an imminent nostalgia, only more than that - like I could really envision myself writing this, like I know that someday I will recall, with a bittersweet solicitude, my scribbling and gripping professors who inspired my life, but perhaps never knew it.

I think it's too easy for undergrads to be scared away from sentimentality, or at least afraid of coming off as a suck-up for professing our appreciation and gratitude to our teachers. Or, as it often goes in my case, we can be too unorganized and wrapped-up in the fascination of our own lives to take an hour after finals to write professor thank-you notes. I'm sure there are many students who do this. I, unfortunately, am not one of them.

I really wish I could dedicate this blog post to my thirty or so college professors and piano teachers and tell them each how they've inspired me over the years, but that would obviously be a lengthy bore to most readers; and besides, to do so online, in such a public display of appreciation, would feel wrong and overtly attention-seeking. But I will say this: that if you are one of my teachers reading this, you have impacted my life in your distinct way; have made me appreciate an unknown part of the world; and have inspired me to become a more intelligent and better version of myself. In other words, you have changed my life, and at a crucial time in my life. Whether you planted ideas of poetry, evolution, politics or environmentalism into my haywire organ of a brain, you gave me a base knowledge that I hope will one day grow into something like wisdom (or, at least, a good talking point at a party). I'm eternally grateful of everything - your kindness, your dedication, your respectable intelligence - that you shared with me while I've been at Oberlin. Although you may teach several hundred students a year and many of them probably disappear post-graduation without a trace, just know that we will remember you.

I like the way Dirda ends his essay (titled "The Learning Channels" - seriously, go read it, it's so good!), in which he stumbles upon an old college professor's newly-published book:

And scribble we all do. I certainly hope in the decades to come I will continue to stipple my books with stars and notes in the margins, and that the energy for learning that my professors have shared with me will build upon itself; and that someday, I may stumble upon a professor's book that will transport me back to a desk in their class, and recall with fondness the gray wintery mornings of February in Oberlin.