I don’t know, did the Internet just get too big for your vanity? After you’ve gone through the airport metal detector you move stumbling for the nearest chair with the components of your bourgeois respectability bundled in your arms; even if you were careful that day and wore socks without holes in them, you’re still a piteous naked thing until you pack up your laptop and replace your shoes.
“I never shall forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The chief advantage of London,’ said he, ‘is, that a man is always so near his burrow.’”
I got to rest in my burrow for all of 2008; in a couple of weeks I have to get out and exhibit myself in front of a classroom again; why am I doing this? Because my father (I was reminded over Christmas) thinks I can still become an excellent teacher and should keep trying to do so? Because of the title of “Professor”—the last corona of prestige from a star that went supernova decades ago? The MLA conference is happening across the bay and I might even attend it.
I think it all can be vanity and still equalize out to a structure that is not vanity. But square pegs, star-shaped holes.
