Post #101: Saying Your Good-Byes

1 March 2024

“Night rains tap at my window

Winds of my thoughts passing by

She laughed when I tried to tell her

Hello always ends in goodbye”

—Rodriguez, Sandrevan Lullaby*

     It was my second term at Oxford; I was 19 years old and reeling from severe culture shock, having crossed the Channel only a few months earlier, equipped for the journey largely by reading Joseph Conrad and George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, with a bit of Quadrophenia and the British Forces Broadcasting Service thrown in for good measure.**

     For I too had grown up on an island of sorts, one that was still under Allied occupation until the very eve of my departure for England: West Berlin, boasting a French, a British, and an American sector. There were no German troops in the city nor German airlines flying into it. Instead, on the way to school I passed several American barracks (one where Hitler’s bodyguard used to train) and was not at all taken aback by the sight of Allied tanks practicing for their parades; nor did it bother me to fly Pan Am or British Airways, not Lufthansa. I even took an olive-green U.S. Army bus to and from my German-American school, a great anomaly at the time of which we were perhaps a little too proudly conscious. I remember too, with particular vividness, how, during the crisis with Libya 1986, we were escorted by military Jeeps with machine guns mounted on them.

     All this, however, was already beginning to look quite remote in my second term at college, as I was rapidly leaving the certainties of my old formation behind under heavy assault from a remarkably different environment. Back with my parents, there was a phone in my room, land-line of course; now only the tutors had them, so far as I knew, and I had to make do with a ratty pay-phone (not even a stylish old red one) at the corner of High Street, or else a university-wide note-passing system that had probably not changed much in a century or two. Nor were there photocopiers, which I had taken altogether for granted in my high school days; instead we had medieval cloisters and a deer park, though there was a lovely computer room, neatly tucked away in one of the turrets, with Macintosh SEs, by way of a glimpse of the future that was just around the corner. For our weekly readings, which were as abundant in theory as they were often scant in practice, we had to fight over the same few library copies of books that ended up on everyone’s reading list, though they were not technically standardized but up to the specific tutor’s discretion, with a view to the exams we would eventually need to sit. It was no great incentive for conscientious scholarship, but neither was it an invitation to lassitude, since we had to face our tutors twice a week, essay-in-hand, for a thorough grilling, either in pairs, or sometimes one-on-one.

     My tutor that Hilary term was called Bob, on secondment from one of the neighboring colleges, and said to be quite a good moral philosopher, which is what we were to study together. He was a strikingly disheveled character, a heavy smoker of indeterminate age who was altogether too complex, in any direction, for me to gauge properly in my continental innocence. By local standards he was also unusually patient and forbearing, and we had a much better time than what I recall, with shudders, from my first term, though my ineptitude was as much to blame as anything. I don’t remember much of the philosophy we covered, except for one day, when we were doing Aristotle and Bob had the most astonishing reaction to the essay I read to him. It was not that he was unduly impressed by my arguments, needless to say; what astounded him, to my own great surprise, was my facility with making what I had to say sound reasonable and convincing, even though he found it quite otherwise, and dismissing much more sensible positions with a rhetorical aplomb that seemed to quite discredit them. In other words—and to be frank I could hardly believe my ears—here was an Oxford tutor who admired my ability to write. And not only this, but when it came to make his formal report about my progress to the college president, he put his esteem on record with a compliment that I shall never forget, and that has brought me through many a dark night as a writer.*** How can one express adequately one’s gratitude for such a gift?

     One day, at lunch towards the end of the term, I bumped into Bob at our college pub, the focal point of all social life and the best place to grab lunch, since the canteen food was inedible except on Sundays and other special occasions (though the dining hall stands as one of the world’s finest—think Harry Potter.) We chatted for a bit, and he joked that I must please send him a postcard when I had become a great success, or something of that nature. I never took him to be very serious about the request, but I promised to do so anyway, if it ever came to that—as a matter of karma, I might say today. And indeed the promise has stayed with me as much as the indelible mark of Bob’s compliment. When I visited Oxford again a few years after graduating, I saw him briefly at my favorite hangout, Café Coco down the Cowley Road, and I believe I thanked him then for his kindness, and renewed my promise, though with the proviso not to get his hopes up too much. That was the last time I saw him, a good twenty-five years ago, though I have vague recollections of sending him a postcard, at some point along the way, begging off on the great expectations a little more definitely than before. At any rate, I never heard back, and thus it was, a few days ago, that I decided it was time to clear my debt once and for all, to track him down, and to present him with this blog and my academic articles as about the sum of what could be expected from me. It was thus that yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail telling me that he had passed.

     It was the best of times, very occasionally, during those three unforgettable years; sometimes, it was the worst of times; but throughout, it was an educational adventure unlike any other I’ve had, and formative in perhaps the richest way I have experienced, though with elements of wretchedness that I would not care to go through again. No, I was not bullied or abused; I just never got the impression that the whole affair was, exceptional moments apart, very happily or wholesomely set up, and not many of the connections I made there have lasted. (Of these connections, more anon.) Had I known more of Thomas Hobbes and Edward Gibbon then, and how miserable they were at the college, my own unflattering impressions might have gratified me more; but even knowing nothing of them yet, I arrived by my own feeble devices at a dim understanding that I had been given precious access to a place not meant to be enjoyed so much as endured for its longer-term benefits—and not only of the shallowly reputational kind either, but seeds that would sprout much later and in all kinds of valuable (though not necessarily remunerative) directions.

     As I caught myself thinking even then, presumably no one attends West Point either, or the Citadel, for the sheer joy of being made to eat dirt, though I would expect the camaraderie and character of one’s peers to make up for a great deal. (Alas, I can’t say I remember seeing much of either consolation during my hell weeks.) It used to be said in the old Viennese soul-healing circles (echoed by Frankl, with qualifications) that it is not usually until 5 to 10 years later that one knows what something in one’s life was really good for, even if one can form an intimation very quickly. And that sounds right to me. I never quite managed, during those uniquely intense and impressionable three years, to become the student my college might have hoped I would be, though I did what I could. Part of the difficulty was that, coming from the outside, it took me longer than others to figure out what exactly was required of me—a developmental deficit that drove me, over the ensuing 5 to 10 years, as per the Viennese dictum, to put all I had into catching up with what I had not been able to do to my own satisfaction as an undergraduate. Even so, a marked ambivalence about academic life that I trace to my college years never departed from me again.

     I believe I did manage to make up, eventually, for what I felt I had missed earlier, gradually working my way through an informal thirty-year reading list (for which, even now, I am ready to answer only to the timeless college, not the physical one I left behind, or this or that recent cohort). Had it been a lesser or a happier place that sent me forth into the so-called adult world, this catching up might not have been as important to me, or have taken me nearly as long to complete. (Not that I am done now, or that anyone ever is; but it does not matter very much anymore what I add, and the melancholy process of slowly losing it all again to gradual mnemonic erosion seems to have begun.)

     I mentioned connections and their lasting, or not. A very few did, for a short while; but one seemed to stand the test of time for several decades—a friend to whom I would for many years have applied, without hesitation, the high praise bestowed by Frederick the Great on the late Hans Karl von Winterfeldt, one of his most trusted generals and confidants, inscribed upon the base of a particularly imposing grave at the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin: “He was a good man! He was a soulful man (ein Seelenmensch)! He was my friend.” In my case, not only my friend but my best man too, at a key moment in my life, from which, brought to its proper conclusion, he promptly disappeared, without a trace, to surface again a few days later as if nothing had happened, at the most inopportune time. This is not the place to review the ups and down of our difficult friendship; how many times I have reached out over the years, compared to how many times he did; how I treated his birthdays, or how he treated mine. I shall not count; instead I shall forever remember, or as long as memory lasts, a royal household flag (no less) that he procured for me, on my 21st birthday, by means unforgettable. And it flies still, after all these years, not in the wind, but on my bedroom wall.

     I don’t know when the time has come to conclude that a decades-old friendship has run its course. The economics textbook might proffer the principle that sunk costs are sunk, and that we should look resolutely forward to expected benefits, not back to shared episodes that carry particular meaning. By that measure, I am no longer as optimistic as I would once have been; but I cannot bring myself to think of human relationships in quite such calculating terms. So I am left wondering when, in the course of human events, the time has come to say your good-byes, while an old friend is still alive, if the will to keep the friendship going has either lapsed, or one can no longer find even the beginnings of a shared understanding of what such a friendship is about. After all, it is not meant to be an endurance test, but an enriching addition to one’s life. Nor can I say with confidence when it is time to bid farewell to an old college to which one owes so much of one’s direction in life, but which was never much of a home and is looking more and more alien at a distance. My favorite corner of the grounds, famed for their overall beauty, was always a set of centuries-old stairs leading up to the dining hall, worn out by countless hungry student steps—a sight as touching to me as the hands on the cave walls at Rio Pinturas. When these steps got torn out a few years ago, replaced with soulless substitutes in the name of greater safety, a good part of my heart that remained buried in those old stones went out with the demolition squad, never to return.

     I confess myself at a loss. All I know is how much I hate good-byes. Sometimes there is nothing to be done: so good-bye, Bob, and thank you; may the depth and sincerity of my gratitude find its way to you somehow, even against all the ostensible obstacles of space and time. What to do with my old friend and other lingering echoes of my college years, ever-fainter but refusing to die away, and haunting my dreams at regular intervals these nights, I cannot resolve. So I will leave them for another day. If the time ever came to say good-bye for real and for good, they would be missed as much as Bob shall be.

*Rodriguez sings “only ends in good-bye”—the voice of melancholy, and quite untrue. Hellos don’t only lead to the end; they lead to many other, better things along the way, some as good as anything in life. But that all hellos must end at last in good-bye, and be it only in one’s final moments, is neither a mood nor a verdict, but a basic fact of life that must be accepted by the wise and the foolish alike.

**Two anglophile History teachers also contributed much, one in ninth grade, the other in eleventh. The first, a certain Mister Halperin, I fortuitously encountered one day, long after he had left my school and we had lost sight of each other, outside the walls of my college. The other I have been in touch with sporadically over the years. I do not know, currently, what has become of either; but my heartfelt thanks go out to both of them.

***I don’t mean to make it sound as if Bob was altogether laudatory in his report, any more than in the session on Aristotle. His official assessment was one of those high-British exercises in wit that are impossible for lesser mortals to follow fully, so I am sure I missed a good many of his clever allusions. That it was hardly adulatory, I knew very well, since he had told me point-blank that he found me far more convincing with the broad than the fine brush. Only the compliment in question, which blushing modesty does not permit me to repeat, was as short as it was unambiguous, and there no could be no question of mistaking any more than of forgetting it, then or ever, so long as I can still recall my own name and wield a pen.

PS: The atrocity committed upon the old stone stairs that I deplore above is not the whole of it, I am sad to report upon another quick visit two weeks ago (a few months after writing the original text). The old library has been gutted as well. Apparently ripping the heart out was not enough; they had to take the soul as well.