I went to grad school where I now teach—after a decent interval of fifteen years spent on the opposite coast. Let’s call it Saint Elihu’s. The major buildings here are in archetypal Collegiate Gothic form, with plenty of carved stone and leaded-glass windows. Gateways and mantelpieces are loaded up with the heraldry of self-praise.

Many of my friends have happily spent their whole adult lives here and never plan to leave. It’s not uncommon for people to say that they love Saint E’s, in a way that I used to find creepy and now begin to find charming.

I’m not quite there yet. I will say, with no hesitation at all, that I am deeply grateful to Saint E’s, or that this is a special place, even—and this is probably the signal that my critical faculties are going—that the education we (when did I start to say we?) offer is equal to the best of its kind, which naturally must be the best kind of education. The day’s probably not far off when I can use the verb “love” in relation to Saint E’s, without blushing. When it happens, maybe I should send out little announcements.

People often ask me if it hasn’t been strange to return. By that I think they mean, isn’t it odd to go back to a place where you’ve been at home and find it changed? As if once you fit in, and now you have to renegotiate your place in the landscape, let out the waistband, reintroduce yourself to people who remember you as you were. There’s been a bit of that, but the part for which the coping saws have really come in handy has been, technically speaking, the opposite of the classic situation. Now I have to get used to being accepted, where I didn’t fit in before (or didn’t think I did, which amounts to the same thing).

Saint E’s outward magnificence derives from, and is largely addressed to, the undergraduates and some of the professional schools (the law school, recently renovated, piles seigniorial on top of baronial in an enviably discreet way). The graduate school is a power in the land too, possibly the King Kong of Ph.D. programs in most humanities and many social-science fields. But at least in my time, graduate students didn’t have that sleek, well-fed, confident, can-do look that shone out from the faces of the undergrads, the lawyers, the architects, and so on. They knew they were getting the best education going; they had a future. We weren’t so sure. And in many ways large and small, Saint E’s showed us, or seemed to show our already quavering consciences, that we were stepchildren. No point in going into the details; they’re incidental. The effect was that we neither gave nor received the admiring love that had built so many college towers. If we had had a broader perspective, we might have realized that the feeling of alienation, of non- belonging, had a lot to do with the anxieties of our disciplines in an America that saw less and less need of us and our particular ways of knowing, and that, within that alienated category, we were, in the aggregate, among the luckier ones, the ones likelier to get a hearing. That was true in the aggregate, however: any individual one of us could wind up in the cold. As if realizing the fix we might be in if we lodged all of our affective investments in an Alma Mater who could turn out to be a Refrigerator Mother, we kept a weather eye out for skid row.

In fact, when I look back at the education I got here, the most valuable part came from talking and sharing anxiety with my contemporaries—some of whom in the end were lucky, some of whom were not (I don’t think the sorting had all that much to do with intelligence and ability). Saint E’s brought us together, but our relation to Saint E’s was always ambivalent and complex. In some ways, we didn’t want to be indebted to the place (affectively, I mean—quite a few of us came away deeply indebted in the more classic sense of the word). Companions of misfortune, we learned what it is like to be on the losing side of institutional rivalries—good training for future careers in the humanities—and we became tougher in the sense of expecting less in the way of visible, public affirmation of what we were doing. Those who solicited and received such affirmation, frankly, we suspected of naiveté or worse.

And now here I am, with light shining through those little Gothic panes onto my desk, part of that Senior Faculty from which I once expected little, explaining to myself how it can be honorable, not just comfortable and convenient, to sing the praises of that Saint E’s to which I owe so much. It’s so uncomfortable to be comfortable when you used to be comforted by your discomfort! And that’s a parable, I hope, not a singularity.