Semester Is Almost Over Quotes

We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn't stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through. Reading couldn't help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. 'Act interested in what they say,' she said, but they never said anything interesting. 'Don't talk too much,' she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn't like people threw tomatoes at me, or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep. And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma's repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communications class, which I had repeatedly failed. This semester I only made it six weeks in before it became obvious I wouldn't pass. I think we'd both finally given up.

Having accepted a graduate fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Cornell, I duly presented myself to begin studies for a Ph.D. One of our assignments during the first semester was to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from cover to cover, along with Norman Kemp Smith's commentary thereon, which was almost as voluminous. Pondering this literature, it did not take me long to conclude that these Kantian ratiocinations, brilliant though they may be, have little to do with that Sophia—that more-than-human Wisdom—of which authentic philosophy, by its very designation, is literally the love. And so, three weeks into the semester, I resigned my fellowship and left Cornell University. "I had always been attracted to the natural world, to forests and mountains especially; and so I resolved to proceed to the great Northwest, henceforth to earn my keep as a lumberjack. No doubt I had an unrealistic and overly romanticized conception of what this entails; but in any case, at that point fate abruptly intervened. I had made my intentions known to my brother, who at the time was studying chemical engineering at Purdue University. He immediately proceeded to the chairman of the physics department to tell him about my case, going so far as to put my letter in his hands. The verdict was instant: 'Tell you brother to present himself in my office Monday morning to assume his duties as a teaching assistant.' It seems the voice of Providence had spoken: despite my very mixed feelings regarding the contemporary academic world, I was destined to pass most of my professional life in its precincts—but not in departments of philosophy!