The chance to be here and not here

One of the -- if not the -- hardest books ever written in the English language (topped sometimes by Finnegans Wake but many don't consider that to be written in English and thereby discount it). The hardest (I'm told? I hope?) professor at Fordham for this condensed summer course. Kids with stomach viruses home when supposed to be not home. Late nights, early mornings, lots of time to read and write and so luxurious the green quiet of the campus enchants me a throwback to many many years ago or even just three years ago the idealist fair asking - what do I want to do with my life (held, I believe it was, at the Lincoln Center Fordham campus) and the now cliche aphorism (you don't say cliche and aphorism, one or the other, too late, too many words, too much post-structuralist post feminist marxist jargon--maybe apophthem?) Henry David Thoreau was it or Emerson the high-school yearbook quote I saw yesterday on the side of a bookbag in the store where one day I used to work (not in the store itself but in the publishing house that supplied the store with its material texts): it was really a slightly edited version to be fair "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams...live the life you imagined" and I thought--that always sounded so exhilarating but really it can be so - wow - tiring and kind of awkward and hard - but exhilarating, yes, even though but day to day it's trudging home on the D train swarmed to overflowing at Yankee Stadium at 10:30 carrying far too many books and wondering if there will be anything left at home to eat for dinner and how early I'll wake up to those loud, energetic voices and thinking - what? what? Signature of all things I am here to read...for how much longer, tonight.