Dr. Marshall arrived on campus in the early
morning.
He enjoyed the beautiful drive down Summit
Avenue, even though the humidity was stifling. There was a strong breeze with
cool streams of air laced through it, these spoke to Dr. Marshall of a storm to
come…and with it, perhaps a break in the August heat.
Students were returning to campus.
The Freshmen were in the quad doing
drills with the R.O.T.C.. Dr. Marshall enjoyed watching the young men exercise;
he could not help but wish that he had been afforded the benefit of such
training before his own service in the Great War.
He began to reflect on his summer sabbatical
at the University of Chicago; it had been illuminating. He particularly enjoyed
the conferences he had attended with the eminent philosopher and physicist,
Alfred Whitehead. To be in such august company was uniquely satisfying, in
spite of the fact that the great-thinker made him feel small, parochial; now he
was glad to be back in Pig’s Eye.
Whitehead’s work is groundbreaking, Dr. Marshall thought, even though it made
him uncomfortable and forced him to confront the limits of his imagination. Concresence,
and other such matters, inspired him, and filled him with dread.
Dr. Marshall knew this much: Whitehead was
articulating a whole new cosmology, a signal change in the basic understanding
of the nature of reality, one based in mathematics and the groundbreaking work in
physics and astronomy being done famous men like himself, Bertrand Russel,
Rutherford, Einstein and others.
The old world…my world would become just a
footnote to theirs, he
concluded morosely.
When he got to his desk in Aquinas Hall, Dr.
Marshall found it much as he had left it at the end of the spring term. The
office was freshly cleaned and dusted but his work was right where he had left
it, including a couple of papers he had not graded before leaving for the
summer.
On
top of the stack there was a paper from Johnny Holiday, whom Dr. Marshall
believed to be exceedingly bright, though functionally derelict, and he had
been happy to see the young man dismissed from the University; he had facilitated
Holiday’s suspension, and it had not bothered Dr. Marshall’s conscience that he
had filed a less than honest report concerning the boy’s general comportment.
Holiday was astute, and he was a gifted
writer, but he was also arrogant, and he did not belong in the university; Dr.
Marshall had surmised it. Having come to that conclusion it seemed to be his
duty to see Holiday removed, it also allowed him to enjoy the process.
He looked out the window thinking about
Whitehead, realizing that as a philosopher, his career had come to an end; he was
more of a historian, a cataloger and explicator of other people’s thoughts. The
world had moved on from Socrates and Plato, men who were revolutionaries in
their time, but had now become like shiny little tiles in the mosaic of modern consciousness.
He felt hollow, a profound feeling of sadness
enveloped him while the sense of his insignificance ate away at his core.
He looked at his desk and read for the first
time the title of Johnny Holiday’s final essay:
Concresence and the
Square of Opposition
The End of Aristotle
in the Age of Uncertainty
Hubris!
Dr. Marshall thought as jealously filled him, chasing
away all the other feelings he had been experiencing.
He hadn’t read the paper, and now in his rage he
threw it in the trash.
As he stared at it, laying in the circular trash
bin, he realized that Johnny Holiday had already progressed to the place in
philosophy that he himself aspired to…and knew he would never acquire.
Johnny was with Whitehead, a creature of the
modern world.
Dr. Marshall was disgusted, he felt nauseous.
He assigned the blame to the handsome Johnny Holiday, though in reality he was
disgusted with himself.
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