Dedication: For My Students @ Middlebury

To say it less sublimely, —in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,The Conduct of Life

Common myth says that a person doesn’t choose a horse—the horse finds his owner.

We’re unsure when or how our accumulated knowledge becomes our very own signature—nor if it ever becomes so since our antecedents are eternally lurking, ghosts whispering in our ears; we are not even sure how much experience and study will be required for us to lay claim to the recognition that this or that is known, completely ours.

So what we do is wait—we prepare and we conjecture and we project, we assume, and we wait for the dawn of the day when we’ll rise and pull open a curtain on to the…