A college course is a narrative form, a story told collaboratively, over time. Ideally, the professor establishes early the story’s shape, pacing, and tone, and the syllabus gives the students ideas of where to look for what happens next. But no course—no good, dynamic course—knows ahead of time what story it will tell. Courses can be strangled by too much narrative rigging: a syllabus that spells out too much; a professor who keeps steering the story toward insights hatched ahead of time, months ago, in the cold of January. Or, a course can lose its way by telling no story at all: the students merely wander in, wearing enormous parkas and hats, do their time, write their essays, and wander out, four months later, wearing shorts and T-shirts. In between is a kind of parallel play, as in a sandbox.
I always make a point, whatever I’m teaching, of synchronizing my syllabus to the changes in the seasons, the light, and the weather. This is easier to do with poetry than, say, with math: in November, you can get a class to look out the window by reading them Wallace Stevens’s “The Green Plant,” which describes how the “lion-roses” of October maples have “turned to paper.” I have poems for late September, for early October, for the first turning leaf or the first snow. In the spring semester, you can flip the hourglass and start to monitor, poem by poem, the first cracks in the earth, the little gains made every day upon darkness and cold. Probably every student I have ever taught has heard me quote Stevens, in “The Poems of Our Climate,” on “the end of winter when afternoons return.”
And so a spring syllabus tells an especially thrilling and encouraging story, whatever the subject matter. It operates like a rope out of darkness. If it’s a poetry syllabus, the content can be made to interpret—even, seemingly, to rally behind or goad—the action outside the window. And, if it’s a course on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, such as the one I am teaching just a hundred or so miles from where she lived and wrote, you can see for yourself more or less what she saw, in the temporal order in which she saw it. “The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune,” Dickinson writes. At the window, voilà: a robin. You can even tell the time of day by her work: “The Birds begun at Four o’clock,” she wrote one morning, as the dawn chorus began to swell, and “Their Voices did expend / As Brook by Brook bestows itself / To multiply the Pond.”
As I write this, the college where I teach, like many colleges in the country, is trying to figure out its way forward in a story in which meanings have suddenly, drastically, and frighteningly changed. The coronavirus has taken the narrative shape away from both students and professors. Now every course—indeed, every community—has to decide how to think about elapsing time made suddenly terrifying. On campus, the season builds to certain milestones: spring break, which in New England often falls with snow piled to the sills; the first semi-warm day, when students implore their professors to teach outside and everyone regrets it; and then the glorious interval of time when the flowers appear, as in a children’s pageant—crocuses, daffodils, tulips. Then trees blossom and the fragrance in the air returns; then bees, fireflies, exams. Then a lull; then you meet people’s parents, take the billowing robes off the peg in your office, and listen to the speakers at commencement.
Everyone depends on these regular phases, these narrative turns, to manage their sadness at saying goodbye. The very term “commencement” is a cunning rhetorical reframing of what is otherwise, for many people, a time of mourning: you’ll never be a college student again; you may never be so close to these people or this landscape. College means different things to different students. It might mean falling in love with a subject, or an author, or a form of attention or concentration. It might mean having a safe place where nobody is insulting you. It might mean coming out, or transitioning. Or it might mean, for the first time, good and nourishing food.
And so the idea of calling it off, cutting it short, could mean that a student might face violence at home sooner than she’d anticipated. It could mean, for an immunocompromised person, the fear of a reunion with her daughter or granddaughter. I keep thinking especially of students who are in love, and who may be in love in ways not permitted in their homes or communities. The person you became infatuated with last Thursday is now suddenly going to be on the other side of the world. I think of students whose identities needed the entirety of spring to play out. What will they face when sent abruptly home? They’d just got started.
Greeting the spring often means tallying losses. If you have a house and a little yard, as I do, you take a look at the roof and see how it’s fared, see what’s up with the trees, and see if the patio table can withstand another summer. If spring means the end of something—as it does for college students, and especially for seniors—the losses are more painful, but somehow the orderly ceremonies of the term can compensate. For that stately process to be undermined by a panic is obscene; for the panic to be over a virus—a form of life with only its own spring-like emergence and thriving in mind—seems especially frightening.
The virus has taught us all not to touch one another. It’s hard for me to imagine doing a lot of cheek-kissing when I see a friend in the produce aisle anytime soon. And we may see verbal language, that old reliable, fill in for the “nonverbal” ways of marking arrivals and departures. But, as students get ready to say goodbye to one another, maybe for a long time, it seems a special kind of irony that they’re not supposed to come into contact. Not a hug, not even a handshake. The old ways of holding your body in relation to another person must, apparently, be redesigned, and under conditions in which a show of personal warmth or connectedness seems especially crucial. I keep thinking of Keats’s makeshift sign-off in what is known as his “last letter”: “I can scarcely bid you good bye, even in a letter,” he writes. “I always made an awkward bow.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
We are all irrational panic shoppers.
The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
How pandemics change history.
