Bathos

How devoid life is of the climaxes that one observes elsewhere.

Today I taught my last class for the semester. I was of course acutely aware that this was to be my 'last class' this year, and my 'last day' with this particular batch of students; so aware, in fact, that it led to a certain perverse brand of self-consciousness that lent an imaginary gravity to the occasion, and assigned to it a wholly superfluous sentimentality. I thought to myself -- surely there will be some token event that will signal this occasion, some little flag that will unfurl to reveal a hidden significance. Surely my students will feel, much as I do, an enveloping melancholy that qualifies their joy at leaving the semester behind. Surely they are as affected by this as I am.

What happened, of course, contradicted everything I had hoped for. I was late to class for reasons that I could not have predicted, and some students -- who had perhaps decided that this last session need not be taken seriously -- had already settled down low in their chairs in an attitude of weariness. My entry to the classroom was met by an almost unanimous sigh of disapproval, and my subsequent efforts to revivify them were countered by an abiding passivity that proved nevertheless to be quite oppressive. The session had acquired an involuntary aspect of gloom, and I was needless to say quite affected by it myself; so much so that I ended it in (mostly dissembled) frustration about a half-hour later. My excitement and nascent self-consciousness had dissipated and was replaced by something much more diffident and perhaps also ineffable. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand the source of one's frustration.

It is just as well. Imagine if the entire class had exploded, much as I had hoped they would, in a simultaneous expression of faux sentimentality; if they had given me a card, perhaps, or sung me a song. I would certainly have not been able to bear the embarrassment. (How fortunate we are that we can abominate in others qualities that we ourselves possess; how lost we would be without this irreplaceable talent.) That they had no desire to do these things leaves me a little doleful, but on the other hand the manufactured heaviness of the past few days is gone. Climaxes are on the whole better left to the imagination.