College Life

You arrive in college out of an all boy’s boarding school and in the first week meet your assigned mentor, the professor who will guide you through your undergraduate years.  The professor has published books that are lauded by fellow scholars as groundbreaking and brilliant. It turns out that this celebrated scholar is to be your teacher in an advanced course for which your high school background has qualified you.  You are enthralled – the professor’s wit, teaching style, and knowledge of literature are of a sort you have never before experienced. As it happens, during the day you occasionally meet by chance, have coffee, chat about family and literature, etc. You also sometimes visit him in his office to discuss what you hope he will affirm as inspired insights. He is pleased, offers guidance and encouragement and tells you how much he enjoys these sessions.  By the second semester, you dare to think you and the professor are friends. He takes you out to dinner and introduces you to fine Italian wine and cuisine and entertains you with gossip about colleagues. The professor increasingly commends you for your ‘wild’ ideas and insouciance. You don’t know what the word means but take it as a compliment.  One evening at a restaurant where they always reserve a private table for the professore, he mentions a composer, Nielsen, of whom you have never heard, and invites you to his apartment later that week to listen to the  music. You eagerly accept and when you hear the glorious music, you are thunderstruck and grateful and say so. He then tells you that he would like you to come up with him to his cabin in Maine.  He also mentions other occasions when he will introduce you to influential friends at Harvard. They will enjoy getting to know you, he says, and will help you advance professionally. He then reads a high talking poem by W.B. Yeats and asks you what you think about the last line, “Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.” Whatever you said, if anything more than a stunned shrug of the shoulders, is now lost to memory, but you do remember his praise for your comments being out of proportion to even your own grandiose sense of yourself. He repeats his invitation to come to Maine. And then everything suddenly becomes unreal or rather all too real like having your face slammed against a wall. What do you do?