Telluride ’23: Pyrrhic Victories (An Introduction)

I imagine I can feel entropy sometimes, like the way you can imagine the sensation of being drained while you’re donating blood. I feel myself piecemeal falling away to nothing, just the shape of what I used to be.

I realized at some point that I was spending too much time in the cage of my skull. Just as I was formulating some sort of escape, I was offered a position, entirely out of the blue, to be a professor at a major university. A friend–more than one, I’m told–who taught at the school recommended me when the spot opened up. I don’t know why they did, but I’m grateful. I asked the head of my department if he wasn’t making a mistake. And I asked him what the kids should call me. I am consumed by feelings of inadequacy, and I wish I weren’t. I’m tired of carrying these things around. My stamina isn’t what it used to be.

My first day on campus, I felt a surge of…I don’t even know how to articulate it. It was exhilaration, yes, plus a little nostalgia, but there was something else, too. I think I felt, in an almost tactile way, the possibility that although we seem to be knocking on the door of lost, all may not be entirely lost. These kids walking around, talking of anything other than Michelangelo, coming to the kind of place that’s going to be shut down, banned, in large parts of the country as our own Great Leap Forward coalesces behind another red-obsessed Morlock and his dangerous cult of personality… It feels like stepping into the last days of a hopeless battle, and deciding that if you were to die here, at least you would die fighting. We scoff at Pyrrhic victories, but they’re victories just the same, and I’m old and I don’t have that much time left anyway.

I thought about not coming to Telluride this year. Because I have time away from my teaching job over the Labor Day weekend anyway, I got in the car. Not wanting to come had a lot to do with how I’ve become phobic about the drive itself. I thought I would be scared of fewer things as I got older, but this is not the case. Unsurprisingly, it’s beautiful here. My friends are here. And I can imagine a different life I might have led, had things fallen a bit differently, though the pull of lives unlived isn’t as barbed as it used to be. I’m coming to terms with who I am and taking stock of what I’ve accomplished.

It’s not much–and I’m not quite done, I guess–but maybe it’s enough. Maybe it’s enough.