Full Circle

Midway through my master’s degree, I found myself sunk in a sofa, listening to one of those arguments you encounter mostly at grad school parties: that you did not need to read a book to have — well, read the book. A classmate had mounted this claim after it became apparent that his criticism of a seminal text came from its general shape rather than readerly observation. The novel was bad, he said. Derivative and unconvincing. He didn’t even need to open it to know that. “It’s like travel,” he insisted. “You don’t have to go somewhere if you know what’s there. I don’t have to go to Greece to have been to Greece.” At which point the woman beside me — our host — turned toward me, a faraway look in her eyes, and murmured, “I’m in Greece right now.”

To tell about those nights is hard, for I was very inebriated and very sad, newly bereft of the mentor whose sins would place him, generously, in the second circle of Dante’s hell, more shrewdly in the eighth or ninth. But...