Samizdat printed so that lawyers will have to pry it from my fingers…

I guess I will just say for now, o most lame and impotent conclusion, that what you say here is pretty much exactly how I tried to conclude the End of the World course, with my final lecture on The Road and how, as the last two paragraphs make clear, Cormac has basically written a book about love. And that all the post-apo narratives come down to some sort of affirmation (however bleak and/or existential, cough*Harpman*cough) of old-school human-human triune-brain affection and kindness. That we don’t (easily) disintegrate into snarling Hobbesian reptilian cannibalistic savagery. That there are always fire-carriers.

I think of this even as the Brujo’s math students plot the exponential curve for pandemics, and, using the WHO/CDC data points for the first nine days, come up with a million cases in the US by May 29th. It’s reason which tells me, no curve can exponentiate infinitely—there’s friction [i.e. public health], and eventually the reproductive rate of any bioform has to level off, etc. But it’s something else which reassures me that people won’t immediately start throwing rocks through store windows and looting (the visual cliché of the post-apo which my students and I laughed at all semester, because I swear it’s in every film from which I showed an excerpt).

A couple of my students had their minds blown by Cixous and Wittig and Rich, which was gratifying. Most didn’t. But when you say:

I think the thing I find most frightening is thinking I have made decisions out of honest consideration of our circumstances, of what is in my children’s best interests as well as my own, only to find out I was frightened of trying for something bigger, or that it was the path of least resistance in the face of institutional sexism so deep that I was merely reinforcing it.

—then it seems to me that just by daring to think that thought, much less write it, you get 15 points out of 10. It’s deeply anti-enlightenment, anti-romantic, to acknowledge our individual actions as arising from an indifferent driving/overarching cultural pattern. To say nothing of downright un-American—we’re supposed to be the land of the rugged individualist! etc. (last frontier: realizing what creatures of circumstance and dependency on infrastructure we are)—but, enough already, because you’ve been enduring impromptu lecture-rehearsals of this little Marxist homily of mine for months now so I’ll can it.

Besides, someone else already summarized it better anyway: This Is Water. Which I photocopied (not realizing it would set me back a cool sixty bucks, gulp) and distributed to my students on the last day of class, saying honestly, I don’t have anything better to give you than this. It’s bleak and lovingly stern, like a liberal-arts Zen teaching. It says: You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. But what you do with your life, and how you treat others, still matters.

And thus I share it with you—at least until Bonnie and Michael email me the C&D/takedown notice. Because samizdat is one way of mattering; and because it’s the closest thing to a diploma I had to give everyone who bravely muscled through all those genuinely horrific readings and stuck the course through right to the end. Well, that and red velvet cupcakes. Have to make those in person for you, sometime. Congratulations on your passionate persistence; and gratitude for your literary companionship/co-teaching/distance supervision.

http://theunreliablenarrator.net/documents/this-is-water.pdf