This guy from the Nether­lands grated on me and on all our doc­tor­al peers when­ev­er, with his heavily accent­ed but perfect English, he held forth in our Euro­pean Lit­er­a­ture class.
          It didn’t matter whether his argu­ments were lofty or feeble (we all tended toward the latter appraisal); we knew they’d be pro­tract­ed. So when­ev­er he began, I cooked up ploys to dis­tract myself until he wound down. Count­ing the faux gas lamps outside on the quad was among the simpler ones.
          I took my advanced degrees in the late 1960s, an era of polit­i­cal turmoil on cam­pus­es every­where; some of us were more involved than others, but the least we could do was signal irrev­er­ence toward the status quo by our attire. The women wore skirts so short they’d have been an outrage a few years before. No cos­met­ics, Lord knows. The men wore bell-bot­tomed pants, tie- dyed T‑shirts, serapes, and so on, any of which often smelled faintly of pot.
          Though this Dutch­man claimed to be Marxist, he seemed imper­vi­ous to such puny rebel­lion. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, which were hip in that era, but he’d likely worn them from his little boyhood. No one ever saw him out of a dark suit. I had no idea what this bane of our aca­d­e­m­ic lives did when he wasn’t opining in class.
          Where did he go? I bumped into him else­where just once—a half hour before seminar on a sleety March Monday. We’d come to the Rexall lunch counter to fuel up on coffee. He’d gotten there well ahead of me, to judge from the slew of small cream­ers in front of him.
          When I ordered an English muffin and a black coffee, the guy spoke up. “I, too, will have coffee.”
          The coun­ter­man looked dazed. “Another one?” he asked. Then he scam­pered away as if he were being chased.
          Our pedant claimed he had impor­tant plans for class. He scarce­ly took a breath as he gave me a few hints. “I will speak of Marvell, Cromwell … and Trotsky,” he gasped.
          I knew better than to say any­thing.
          Soon enough, I fumed through his “radical response” to Andrew Marvell’s “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.”
          Of all the poems to move a reader to the bar­ri­cades! He blabbed on, espe­cial­ly about the poem’s final stanza:

Gather the flowers, but spare the buds;
Lest Flora angry at thy crime,
To kill her infants in their prime,
Do quickly make the example yours … 

          I can’t imagine by what twisted argu­ment he linked this passage to the King Charles regi­cide, or how he saw it as a paean to Oliver Cromwell. I was always tempted to walk out on such bull­shit; I even imag­ined punch­ing the blowhard, though I knew that would be too cruel. He’d surely never been in a fight. It was lit­er­ary vio­lence that turned him on, that inspired his self-styled unortho­doxy. When it came to John Milton’s war in heaven, I saw him drool, pumping his hand in the air like a school child. Again, I can’t remem­ber the drift of his drivel on that famous battle.
          As I say, every time the Dutch­man launched his rhetoric, I’d conjure some­thing to dis­tract me. One morning, I scanned the room, my eyes at floor level, trying to match each class­mate to her or his shoes. I wanted a perfect score when I looked up, so the process took some time. When I finally ticked off my suc­cess­es and fail­ures, I half-believed that the fail­ures were frowned on by the ancient dig­ni­tary who peered down from a por­trait above the fire­place. If I ever knew that patriarch’s name, I’ve for­got­ten it. I recall how his hair fell in ringlets, and how, to kill more time, I tried to count them.
          I could also stare at the sky through the room’s rippled panes. I might try to figure out whether the jets, leaving con­trails in their wake, were headed for distant nations, maybe even the Nether­lands. Again, it was only a matter of eating up minutes.
          In spring, I watched the gam­bol­ing of squir­rels in a pocked beech.
          I must have struck our teacher as a dreamer. The one time he called on me, he asked: “If you had to define Realism, how would you go about it?”
          I don’t know how I answered, but my class­mates shot me quizzi­cal looks. After that, the pro­fes­sor never addressed me directly—about anything—and I rarely ven­tured an opinion, either. I didn’t want to stir up rebut­tal from our Dutch dilet­tante. I’d paid all the dues I owed over coffee that morning, and the last thing I needed was to engage with him again! You know the type: the self-pro­claimed smartest guy in the room.
          My dislike for this man lasted for more than fifty years, and it was always a trivial thing in any larger scheme. In spite of him, I enjoyed my grad­u­ate years or at least I look back on them more fondly than the college ones. That some of my class­mates, now eighty years old, seem to view their under­grad­u­ate span as the pin­na­cle of their lives will always puzzle me.
          I’ve kept perhaps three or four lasting friends from college. I made equally few, but in some cases, closer ones in grad school. But apart from the occa­sion­al visit, letter or, lately, email, to keep me in touch with them (and two are dead now), I haven’t reflect­ed much on that doc­tor­al phase either. That my friends had a similar edu­ca­tion is hardly the tie that binds. All of which made it unusual for me to open the most recent grad­u­ate school’s newslet­ter, which I usually delete unread. In reading it, I dis­cov­ered that our Dutch con­tem­po­rary had died twenty-plus years ago.
          “Jesus!” I huffed, as if I’d had my wind knocked out. My sur­round­ings looked unfa­mil­iar. I felt like I’d never sat at my desk, which I bought forty years ago from a dear neigh­bor, now dead himself. Two gawping ravens winged by my window. Every­thing felt ominous.
          These mem­o­ries have all been prompt­ed by the news of the Dutchman’s death but also by my mys­te­ri­ous reac­tion to it.
          Word had come so late only because the man’s widow had wanted to gather enough funding for a Dutch foun­da­tion, which she’d named for our grad­u­ate nemesis. She thought that by announc­ing the charity, once it was estab­lished, she’d allow his old friends to remem­ber him admir­ing­ly. I felt a jolt of sadness. I wasn’t sure he’d made any of what you’d call friends.
          The foundation’s mission? “To foster peace and tol­er­ance among peoples,” two ideals our old rival appar­ent­ly embod­ied in his pro­fes­sion­al life. No matter his intel­lec­tu­al pre­ten­sions in our time, he hadn’t had a schol­ar­ly career but had taken a post with an inter­na­tion­al human­i­tar­i­an orga­ni­za­tion.
          After thirty years of service, his death came in Sudan in 1999, not from that country’s endless vio­lence but from some rare blood disease. He was sent home, since no ade­quate facil­i­ty for treat­ment existed in that part of Africa— or any­where, it seems. Still, the exper­tise of spe­cial­ists in Ams­ter­dam couldn’t save him.
          Yes, all this flat out ambushed me! I was filled with a seem­ing­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate remorse, given how I’d once felt about the man. Tol­er­ance? How little I’d shown him, and indeed many others who crossed my path back then. I was all for world peace, I suppose, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly per­son­al.
          This wouldn’t be the last time I hoped that being igno­rant in one’s youth is a for­giv­able sin. I thought of that old saw about not judging a book by its cover, but more point­ed­ly of some fre­quent advice from Amico, my beloved late grand­fa­ther-in-law, who could tell from our very first meeting that I was one hyper­crit­i­cal son of a bitch.
          The old man would fre­quent­ly encour­age giudizio dolce, gentle judg­ment. His view of the world, I always believed, accord­ed with the state reli­gion W.H. Auden pro­posed for his whim­si­cal utopia in The Dyer’s Hand: “Roman Catholic, but in an easy-going, Mediter­ranean sort of way.”
          I sat still for minutes on end, that para­graph of alumni notes glaring at me from my laptop’s screen. Then I stepped out the back door to gaze at the steep ridge to our west. The hard­wood buds were showing as pretty a red as always for this time of year, but now recalled the shade of blood. I turned my back on it.
          The east­er­ly view felt more aus­pi­cious. The hills were cloaked in ever­green. The pines’ new needles stood on top of the old ones like candles, so bright did they look against the granite.
          If I’d been a Catholic like Amico, easy-going or oth­er­wise, I might have pic­tured each of those little flares as a votive. Instead, I thought of a famous phrase, attrib­uted to every­one from Con­fu­cius to Adlai Steven­son: “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the dark­ness.”
          Stand­ing in the chill, I did what I’d done many times before and will keep doing: I prayed to what­ev­er non-spe­cif­ic God I own that I might be par­doned for ungen­eros­i­ty in my life, which has been much less ded­i­cat­ed to the good of the world than my old grad school peer’s.