We begged him to come
Not because he was desperately needed
But because his absence would have left a dangerous gap
We could not afford.
He arrived
After a lengthy debate with himself
With a quiet disposition
And a sincere disbelief in our good will.
Later,
In small gatherings in which we tried to make him feel at home,
He would often not say much
Except in shy disjointed phrases
That came out as loud bursts of disagreement.
One could have even liked
These crude, almost offensively honest, remarks
If it were not for the arrogant conviction in his voice
That he could not be other than right.
His face lit up when manuscripts and dictionaries were mentioned
It was almost as if someone else had temporarily borrowed
His face.
He loved languages
And most of all roots of verbs
Not because they could be celebrated as fertile sources of derivation
But because he could substitute
A history of their morphological behavior
For curiosity about the splintered, panoramic allusions
They must have spread in the air
When people of the past spoke them
In fact, verbs loomed so large on the horizon
That little room was left for the speakers.
In a way, the entire history was a nuisance
A disruption of the “truths” one ought to be seeking
The “truths” he knew had always existed
Tucked away in between the golden layers of classical ages
And had been known
To unrivaled masters of conceptual skills
Beyond the grasp of many a modern intellect.
Now, he stood shoulder to shoulder with these masters everyday
And unearthed such truths from the disappearing depths of rarely
Understood texts
Celebrating, in the process, the self-inflicted loneliness that
Despite its chronic pain
Made him shine like an old precious jewel
Set on a cheap machine-made modern ring
But a rare jewel nontheless.
The students resisted him, with all their young stubborn might
We did not press them to change their minds
When the end of his short term with us came
He did not insist on staying longer
Neither did we.
He took his quiet disposition, love for verbs,
And occasional loud disagreements…and left
Having never touched us or been touched by us.
Two passers by going in opposite directions
We found ourselves face to face for one instant
And bowed
Not out of overwhelming reverence, I suppose
But because a handshake would have been a lie.
Perhaps we were too unpredictable, too noisy, too disturbing
For him.
Perhaps we disrupted the neat conceptual arrangement of the
“truth” as he knew it.
Perhaps we were too much like history
Moving too fast for comfort
And better to be avoided.
St. Louis, Sept. 2000