Excerpted from Fresh, Green Life. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Catapult, LLC.

I had considered my options throughout the day, at first thinking I would spend New Year’s Eve alone in my apartment, getting drunk off beer and watching videos, then admitting this too depressing a solution to my evening, perhaps coloring the forthcoming year in a somewhat inauspicious light. I then thought of taking the Amtrak up to New York to watch the ball drop at Times Square, cheering down time among the jubilant throng, those perennial revelers whom I had only ever witnessed as anonymous holiday extras on the television screen. The possibility of transforming myself into one of those people for the evening felt attractive enough to justify the expensive train ride and long evening in the cold, though, it was true, the few friends I had who lived in that city likely had other plans, and if I were to find a place to sleep after the ball had dropped, I would have to arrange something quickly. My final option was to spend New Year’s Eve at Professor Aleister’s, as he had emailed me a few days prior, first to apologize for allowing such a long gap in our admittedly seldom correspondence, and then to say he was throwing a party at his home in the Philadelphia suburbs, adding, in a somewhat overly familiar way, I thought, that even though he was now alone and a widower, he wouldn’t let that get in the way of enjoying the little time he likely had left in his life. He had never previously mentioned that his wife had died. At the end of his email he said that several of my graduating year’s cohort from the philosophy and literature department would be in attendance, and that should I like to see what Robert, Thomas, and Maria (he had italicized her name) had been doing in the decade since our graduation, I should think about spending the evening at his house, although, he admitted, it was a somewhat unorthodox gathering to begin with, but one that he felt was necessary to hold, given his more-recentthan-not retirement from teaching—he had never had a retirement party proper—and of course, his even more recently passed birthday on Christmas Day, adding that he had always, throughout his life, felt cheated of a decent birthday party due to this natal coincidence. The gathering would therefore offer itself thrice over: a celebration of a retirement, a birthday, and a New Year, in that order. I reread the invitation as many times, and couldn’t help but notice Professor Aleister’s italicization of Maria’s purported presence: perhaps he knew how I had felt about her all throughout my schooling years, how I had never done a thing about it, not once, and how possibly that fondness had still not dampened over the years. And how furthermore there is perhaps no greater excitement than seeing an old love interest yet again, years later, with the hope of advancing what was not possible before. This is especially true if one is more lissome and statuesque than when last seeing that never-to-be beloved, which as it happens was precisely the case with me. I am no model, surely, but in the past several years I’ve taken an utmost interest in my health after a minor heart scare, a heart scare that should not have happened at my age, and I consequently began exercising six days a week, eating the healthiest and most organic food I could afford with my meager teacher’s salary, and finally, giving up cigarette smoking. The sum effect of this, course, was that while my body was once unflattering and general—marked by all manner of playtime excess—it was now lithe, muscular, and cast by the daily work that gave it shape. I had made myself a sculpture. Even my skin appeared more limpid than it did when I was in my twenties, when I was always on some badly cut party drug, chain-smoking yellow American Spirits, and shoving late-night, grease-dripping food into my mouth. The consummate diet of the young academic, as it were. Yes, the Professor had left this detail of Maria dangling in his email—surely, he knew what he was doing—and as I was long-lonesomely single and desperate to capture her attention, he knew I would likely come, and he was right.

I discovered through social media that Maria had recently divorced from her consultant husband, whom I remember she had met during a summer internship for the United Nations. She was working with a department having to do with the business of South Korea, whatever that business may have been, and one day during her lunch break she had encountered a young brutish man (I say he is brutish, at least) who was at the time working for the French consulate. This was the summer before our final year at school, at our dear, experimental liberal arts college in the outskirts of the greater Philadelphia area. We were sweating at our cramped wooden desks on our first day back from summer break, in that Hobbit-like stone hermitage which often housed our philosophy classes, when Maria had told me this, how she had met this Andrei, a Russian American man from New Jersey who studied French, and how they started dating from the day they met, and were now maintaining a long-distance relationship—Pennsylvania to New York, at least—and how she decided that, no matter what happened regarding her future employment, she would be moving to New York City once we had finished that final year of schooling. She had always wanted to move to New York, she added, where things really happened. Things only seemed to happen in Philadelphia, or rather, things happened much like they happened elsewhere: indifferently and without mention. In New York, however, everyday events took on a totemic importance, and were immediately enshrined in a documentary-like collective memory among all who lived there. It is perhaps for this reason there are so many movies about that city. I remember, too, having felt a shock when she told me about her new relationship: this boy’s full name was the same as that of my favorite film, about the eponymous fifteenth-century Russian painter of icons. As she finished announcing this news to me, Professor Aleister walked into our sweltering classroom, visibly sweating through a thick cable-knit sweater he wore year-round, regardless of the weather. It seemed as well he was not wont to wash it, as there were always deeply discolored brown splotches at his armpits—stark as ink stains against the sweater’s beige—scandalously on display when he lifted his arms to write something on the chalkboard. Maria and I had enrolled in Professor Aleister’s class on Dante’s Divine Comedy—though he was to refer to it only as “La commedia”—which was listed by our university as a course of philosophy, and not of literature. Given the experimental nature of our school, strict distinctions of academic genre were often not properly abided, and as such one could take a course on, say, the occult economies of sub-Saharan Africa, and this would be listed as a course in literature, not in economics or sociology. And just the same, one could take a course titled, say, “Balzac’s Nineteenth Century,” and one would find oneself in a course regarding the post-Revolutionary political economy of France, and not, in any way, literature. It would be possible that one would not read the name Balzac anywhere that semester outside of what was printed on the front page of the course syllabus. Our school lacked proper majors as well, so that when one went gallivanting in the city of Philadelphia and mingled with the students of Temple University or the University of Pennsylvania, and those same inquisitive students posed questions regarding one’s major, the students of our school often found themselves in a position to craft roundabout speeches explaining how they didn’t have “real majors,” as it were, but “academic concentrations,” and these concentrations in turn reflected more refined scholarly interests that could not quite be reduced to a “literature major” or a “psychology major,” though often enough, after a year or two of these speeches, many of us would forgo such perfunctory explanations and simply concede that, indeed, they “majored” in philosophy and literature, as was the case with me, as well as with Maria, Robert, and Thomas. Yes, on that first day back from summer break, Professor Aleister walked in and without so much as a deferential nod toward any of us wrote a line of poetry on the board—from Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets”—and said this single line of poetry would function as our “syllabus” for the semester. There would be no other course policy or instructions. He then spent the rest of the class period asking each of us in turn to discern what he could possibly mean by this—how a line of poetry, from Eliot no less, could function as the course syllabus on the teaching of Dante’s writing, which was in fact a class of philosophy, moral philosophy, the Professor emphasized, and not of literature. The Professor did this every semester. One semester, our “syllabus” was a line from Frost: “We dance round in a ring and suppose / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” Another semester, it was from Emerson: “Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.” And so on with secrets. It was for this reason I had taken classes with Professor Aleister, and why the few of us (such as Maria, Thomas, and Robert) had returned to him so often: we would barely do any work. Professor Aleister often came in with a quote, with a print cutting from some review or article, and he would lead us into argument among ourselves without any real reason or, by the end of that period, any satisfying conclusion as to why we had passed seventy minutes in the manner we had. That Dante course was my seventh with the Professor, under whom I ultimately studied for four years, lazily and haphazardly reading Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Hegel (who he was made to teach against his will, he said), and a variety of Gnostic lunatics. Well over ten years had now passed since this period, and I could scarcely tell you much about what any of these men had written down in their famous books I was put to read and which later I was asked to write about at a length of ten to twenty pages, essays I had completed always at the very last possible moment, because their quality did not matter. I unequivocally received an A– on these assignments: strong ideas, as always, the Professor’s remarks would say, but needs work in execution. I was certain he did not read them beyond the titles, which, I admit, I had put great effort into fashioning as clever puns: something like, “Nasty Kant: Gender, Affective Altruism, and the Categorical Imperative.”

That Dante course would be the last I shared with Maria. In this final class, the Professor kept returning to a certain line from Dante, which he would always cite in the Italian, despite the fact he never otherwise did this with any other line from the book: E caddi come corpo morto cade. He said this was the key to Dante: And I fell, like a dead body falls. In Canto V, Dante encounters Paolo and Francesca, the ill-fated lovers damned to the second circle of Hell in an eternal whirlwind. After Dante hears their story, he faints. I remember the Professor said all of Dante could be conjured in this image—that the world of Dante was the world of fainting, of total syncope, so unable are we to bear the stories other people tell us. We are all forever being thrown off a cliff, in Italian. And moreover, in the original, the Professor said, Dante offers us the striking insistence of those alliterative C’s: E caddi come corpo morto cade, which he said sounded like an infirm pebble banging against a rock. That lecture ended, I remember, with the Professor’s remark that we were all infirm pebbles, tumbling downwardly to the mouth of Hell, and often throughout the rest of the course he would walk into the classroom muttering E caddi come corpo morto cade in such a low and gravelly patter that it sounded like a percussive jingle intended to threaten us. Before opera and poetry, he said, Italian was the language of damnation.

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