Episode 1: The Reckoning
Do the math. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself.
All of those comments he has written on students’ work over the past 20 years: twenty-five students to a class, five essays a semester, that’s one twenty-five right there. Let’s say, conservative estimate, he bled out half a page of commentary on each assignment. At least six courses a year, that makes three hundred and seventy-five pages of comments. Multiplied by 20 years: 7500. Seven thousand, five hundred.
7500 pages he’d written over the past two decades. 7500 pages of himself, just given away. What could he have done if he had used that time to write 7500 pages of something that fed his soul? What could he have produced? What embered masterpiece glowed inside him, just waiting for a breath, while he pleaded with students, line after line, page after page, to engage with the text, to watch those comma splices, to sharpen those transitions between paragraphs?
Whatever it was, whatever it might have been, it was all cold ashes now. His book — his life’s work — had been scrawled by hand in fits of frustration and contentment, boredom and rage. He had written while depressed, while sick, while perfectly happy and genuinely enlightened, even inspired, by what a student had submitted. Night after night. Then risen the next day to crush and scatter his thoughts to the masses, most of whom would ignore what he had written and skip right to the letter grade.
And so his life’s work — 7500 pages over 20 years, the math wasn’t hard — did not exist. He could account for every page, and it did not exist.
Don’t think about that. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself.
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