Surprise!

Surprise! I tried this the regular way, and got the regular note saying my invitation has expired, but there were some possible links shown low on that page, among them HOME. I clicked HOME, and behold! I was in. So I looked at the blog and came here to write.

The inspirations I had for yesterday have mostly vanished now: The groundhog did indeed see her shadow, hereabout, at any rate, and I suppose we are to get set for another six weeks of winter. So be it. Yesterday's sunshine was good to see, at any rate.

Yesterday by coincidence I had a couple of pages of the Eugene Register-Guard, and when I had seen the page offered me, I turned the page before discarding it. Obituaries, among them a boxed one with a very young photo in it. After thought and reading, I discovered it was my dissertation director, Tom Hart, a professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages for many years at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and for several years the editor of Comparative Literature. It took me aback. My memories of him are vividly alive, though I last saw him the day my doctorate was conferred, in an outdoor ceremony on the lawn near Friendly Hall, August 1984.

The day I first encountered him, after completing an MA in English Literature, I had just changed my graduate major focus from English Literature to Comparative Literature; so I was hardly prepared for a class being taught in Portuguese. I thought, You are out of your depth this time. You have bitten off more than you can chew, and other cliches. But I stayed the three hours, and somewhere in the second hour, Professor Hart switched to helpful English, so that I understood the reading assignment and took heart for the long haul. His classes were not predictable; they kept the small handful of students of the medieval Provençal lyric wide awake.

There are many memories: a vivid one of the day of my final orals, when at lunch break after the exam was finished, he and other members of the committee were crossing the lawn, chanting the lines of "Lycidas" I had quoted in my response to a question. I think they were skipping, also, though that may have been the effect of summer light and the euphoria of having the exams over ...