Thursday, 8 September 2022

The First Day…

You’d think that at 67 the thrill of the first day of classes would have faded. But actually, not so much. I find great pleasure in the first classes, where the fields of knowledge, like arcadian fields, stretch out in the distance, green with promise, the inevitable bogs and ravines and precipitous slopes smoothed by distance into an intriguing terrain ripe for exploration. My enthusiasm has not yet been tempered by the practical realities of problem set, or the daunting challenge of resurrecting my very shaky knowledge of tensors after four decades have passed.

Thrill, for me, partakes of the sublime, in the sense that thrill has dark threads woven into it. So in addition to the positive feelings, there is also the familiar awkwardness of having to interact with strangers, exacerbated by the many decades of age difference. To the other students, I suspect I look like a professor, but I am as ignorant, if not more so, than they. And, of course, we are at very different places in life, and part of very different milieus.

I am taking – as an auditor – two courses at the University of Minnesota. One is Geomorphology, and the other is Fluid Earth Dynamics (basically Fluid Dynamics applied to geological materials). These are driven by my interest in geology: so far I have completed five courses, all of which were primarily interest driven. The two are higher level courses, and though there is of course a current of interest in them, they also seem like part of the repertoire of geology that should be known by anyone who wishes to pretend to an earnest knowledge of the subject.