With one foot out the door

Tomorrow is the last day of classes in the Advanced Degrees Program. I'm already halfway gone.

My summers at Sewanee have the social intensity of undergraduate life, only much more concentrated -- and without the awkwardness and shyness and painful introversion of my late teen years. (Also with more bourbon.) This year, much more than last year, the departure will be wrenching. This time I've made friends, and not just classmates-and-meal companions, and I hate to part with people just as I'm getting to know them. Friendships are fragile things at best. Or rather -- because fragility seems the wrong metaphor here -- they can dissolve too easily, dissipating slowly because there is nothing to give them shape. IM conversations and phone calls are too ethereal to do the trick. Aristotle was right that genuine friends, friends whose connection depends on shared ideals and common character, have to "live together" -- not that they have to be roommates, of course, but that they share the activities of life. And that doesn't mean "share" in the sense of "Thank you for sharing." It's not a matter of confession or disclosure, though that comes too, but fundamentally a matter of acting in concert. It's no accident that conversatio primarily means, as we might say, "running around together."

I realize as I write that part of what I meant by "I'm already halfway gone" -- or, to be more accurate, part of what makes that true -- is that in spite of myself I'm already envisioning the end of the conversatio with my new friends. And though one of them will probably be back next summer, another will certainly not.

The other part -- the part I was conscious of when I began this post -- is that at this point I'm thinking entirely about the book that has to get written by the end of the summer. I'll get back to the STM work in September. For now, I'm thoroughly mentally abstracted from the theology of ministry and the rhetoric of Jesus. I'm writing a book on medieval philosophy, and oddly I seem to be attending seminary classes in the midst of it for no discernible reason.

It gets back to the double-mindedness I talked about here -- though the discontent has fortunately subsided. I'm looking forward to next summer (ah -- yet another way in which I'm only halfway here) when I can concentrate entirely on the STM work, and when, I fervently hope, I won't be in the middle of a four-month absence from the love of my life.