Painting by Cheryl Ratcliff |
In the Faculty Dining Room: “Christ,
it is sad, sad to see, on quite a few of these faces — young ones particularly
— a glum defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they
are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense.
Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporate executives. But
isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters
alive? Isn’t it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn
out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one
of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?
“For these glum ones, apparently
not. They would like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves
for this job and now they have to go through with it. They have wasted the time
in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have
cut themselves off from the majority — the middlemen, the hucksters, the
promoters — by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge;
discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without
it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These
professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you
don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him,
and fell privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
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