n. event, from the nominalized form of the verb to befall.
ex. In the OC, it is a major Ereignis to walk more than a city block. (Or to see an actual city, divided into blocks.)
Irvine, California, is not so much a city as an amorphous blob of identical carpeted apartments and prefab miniature mansions built in at least three clashing architectural styles, located about fifty miles south of Los Angeles. It is a mass that sprawls indistinguishably into the never-ending tangle of freeways and strip malls that make up parched, moneyed Orange County. Irvine’s streets are twisting, highway-fast arterials that often go two miles without a turnoff or turnaround, punctuated only by cul-de-sac planned communities and chain businesses, all with addresses like 50955 Vista Bonita Drive, where the eponymous view has long been bulldozed away to build a SoulCycle studio.
Surrounded on all sides by four of these mini-highways is the campus of the University of California at Irvine, which is secondarily famous for being the ninth-ranked public research university in the United States, and primarily famous for its excellent (or terrifying, depending on your aesthetic) examples of brutalist architecture. The William Pereira originals that comprise most of the core campus were so futuristic-looking at the time they were built, in the 1960s, that they were used as set pieces in a 1972 Planet of the Apes sequel. The squat, concrete assemblages of cubbyhole windows are arranged in a circle around a large, hilly park shaded by towering and fragrant eucalyptus trees. This park is beautiful, but according to campus lore, it was designed in the early 1960s to be inhospitable to students hanging out in large numbers—you know, to prevent protesting, sitting-in, troublemaking, rabble-rousing, communism, etc. Today, almost all of Irvine’s graduate students live in subsidized housing on the outskirts of campus, because they can’t afford private apartments anywhere near the place. As a result, the university is an isolated haven of research and angst, inchoate but nevertheless hermetically sealed, inside one of the most vacuous communities in the world.
Moving to Southern California from New York to start graduate school in German at the age of twenty-nine was like being buried alive in Chanel logos. For the past eight years, I’d just had to step out the door of my building to be surrounded by diversity and energy and life. I’d been a cheap subway ride away from interesting things—and if I found myself tipsy and alone in a strange neighborhood in the middle of the night, I could get into a cab and feel relatively confident about getting home safe. Now, suddenly, I was living in that subsidized grad housing—whose primary construction materials seemed to be particleboard and not giving a shit—surrounded by twenty-two-year-old strangers. My randomly assigned roommate, Beryl, was a tiny beauty from Turkey who spent most of her time lighting hookah coals on our electric stove and complaining about how cold it was; our ever-present neighbor, Elena, was an unrepentant semifunctioning opiate addict from Boston whose gaunt body and giant brown eyes attracted every burnout and predatory dickbag within a ninety-mile radius. I’m not saying this in judgment of them; quite the contrary: they were wonderful people, really, and they gave the place its only character.
And that was fortunate, because I was trapped at home a lot of the time, dependent as I was on my 1990 Volvo, my long-dormant driving abilities, and my nonexistent gasoline budget to go anywhere outside of campus—and, further, since Orange County’s businesses primarily catered to the cosmetically augmented housewives of wealthy Republican businessmen (often themselves cosmetic surgeons), there wasn’t much of anywhere to go. There were no dive bars or cool coffee shops within walking distance of campus, both because if you asked where a cool coffee shop was, OC residents would say “You mean, like, Panera?” and because nothing was within walking distance of anything, and nobody walked anywhere. Despite living in beautiful walking weather literally every single day of the year, people in Orange County regularly—I mean regularly—drove to different points in the same shopping mall.
Living in the OC was like being stuck in the backseat of a car with a too-smooth automatic transmission and overpowering new car smell, on a road trip through an airless nothing-space, for infinity, because (in true Kafkan fashion), the road trip was the destination. The only recreation my fellow grad students seemed to enjoy was an identical series of house parties held in identical flimsy apartments, where we sipped identical putrid glasses of Charles Shaw wine (“Two-Buck Chuck,” purveyed for $1.99 plus tax at Trader Joe’s), out of identical red Solo cups.
So what in the ever-loving fuck was I doing there? Well, besides the small matter of the hundred thousand dollars the German department had given me to come be allegedly smart in their midst, the OC did have its selling points, even to someone as pale and surly as me: the vegetarian food was spectacular; there were pockets and exurbs that weren’t inhabited only by surgically enhanced wealthy white assholes, if you knew where to look; I could ride my bike to the same beach that the Bluths visit on Arrested Development; it was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever cold. And, as a special bonus, after being dumped and disillusioned, I could start my life over not knowing a single soul.
And yet. Were those good enough reasons? Where was my all-consuming love for the German canon? A reverence that hovered somewhere between religious and sexual ecstasy, culminating in the steadfast knowledge that even if nobody ever paid me a cent, I would sit around writing lengthy research essays about Goethe and Schiller and Rilke in my spare time for fun? I wasn’t sure I had it. Yet? At all? I certainly found German literature interesting—and German philosophy, and language, and culture, and art, and architecture; I was a grown-up now with a modicum of intellectual curiosity and maturity, and had legitimate favorites in each of those categories. (Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense”; the word angeblich, or “allegedly”; tiny eyeglasses and ubiquitous bicyclists; Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Hardin; anything Bauhaus.) I also, in my intellectually mature adulthood, actually enjoyed working through very difficult texts that few other people had heard of (much less understood), simply for the challenge and the uniqueness. I even enjoyed this enough to do it for thirteen hours at a time, which was lucky, because that is often how my days went down. (Good thing I had nowhere to go and no money to get there.)
But still: Was any of this sufficient? Should I really make German studies a career? I thought. Could a person even do that? But I was staring down thirty and had not, as of yet, found anything I wanted to do enough to keep doing it for more than a few years. I quit jobs, I moved out of apartments, relationships self-destructed (or I destroyed them), and now suddenly here I was at the age most people are at least in middle management. All I knew, as I began a journey that would last at least a half-decade and likely shrink my career prospects to even smaller than they already were, was that I wanted to dedicate myself as fully as possible to something really, truly rigorous. Or at any rate, I didn’t not want it badly enough not to do it.
“I cannot fathom why anyone would want to do this,” said Anja, the Irvine German department’s newest professorial hire, on the first day of my first graduate seminar ever, of the education that she herself had recently finished and the academic position that she herself had. “The job market is terrible—I mean, terrible. There are no jobs. And this is such a difficult and obscure subject. So I’d like to know, really know—why are all of you here, studying this subject, at this time?” Anja was German, and—as everyone from the Herrmanns of Münster and the unemployed room-renters of Berlin had helpfully informed me over the years—nobody has less understanding of why non-Germans want to study Germans than Germans.
But she was right. The doctorate was a massive commitment. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to get paid to read and learn (and teach, when you don’t know how to teach)—but divide it by several years, and then subtract the cost of tuition, fees, and health insurance, and suddenly you’re looking at a living stipend of less than fifteen grand a year. (“Technically it’s only for the nine months you’re here,” our professors bristled if anyone dared mention penury. “In the summer, you’ll have to wait tables or something.” How we were supposed to do that while studying thirteen hours a day for our comprehensives was left to our imaginations.)
On that first day of Anja’s seminar, my classmates—they were named Eileen, Evan, and Christiane—all dutifully reported their Germanist creation stories. Evan was a former opera singer who had begun studying German as part of his training as a Heldentenor—and then read one Schiller play and couldn’t resist the lure. He had a ponytail that reminded me a little too much of the one Bart cuts off a Ph.D. student in an episode of The Simpsons. (“I’m a grad student! I’m thirty and I made six hundred dollars last year,” says Bart, wiggling the hair behind his own head. Then Marge says: “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”) Eileen had moved to Germany after college to be with her German boyfriend, gotten super-fluent, but then became bored teaching English for a corporate language school; she would use her student loans to finance summer trips back to the Vaterland. Christiane was German, so her reasons weren’t questioned. It got to be my turn, and my throat squeezed itself shut. I didn’t know what to say. I cycled between rage and panic. My relationship with German literature was private and intimate, goddammit, and none of these strangers’ beeswax. And, also—two contrary opinions at once, Herr Dr. Kafka—my relationship with German literature, especially vis-à-vis pursuing it as a permanent profession, was completely unclear. So what should I say?
How about: I am here because I wanted health insurance for five years while I figured out what to do with myself, and I thought I’d be supported by my movie-star boyfriend, but now I’m not, and I guess I better make a real fucking go of it?
How about: I am here because my childhood boyfriend was into Franz Kafka, and then he dumped me, and I figure by becoming a successful Kafka scholar I will somehow show him once and for all?
How about: I am here because I want a really difficult challenge that means something to me intellectually and emotionally, and someone among you apparently thought I’d be up for it, and that I’d belong with you people, but I do not know if this is the case?
In the end, I said: “I’m sorry. It’s personal.”
Anja shrugged, said, “Interesting. Fair enough.” My classmates stared at me uneasily. I’d made two grave grad-school faux pas by showing any sort of unexpected emotional vulnerability and by defying authority. The move to the OC had been one form of culture shock, but it was inconsequential compared to induction into the doctoral-study milieu.
There were so many new behavioral conventions I wasn’t sure I could adopt them all fast enough. For starters, I had to start dressing differently. Worse. Much, much worse. On my wooing visit to Irvine, I’d spent three hours sitting in on a seminar called “Poetics of Punishment,” whose intellectual rigor made my M.A. courses seem like the fourth grade, but whose sartorial rigor was somewhere on the continuum between halfway house and unintentional self-parody. Students in my M.A. program had the same priorities as Maya Rudolph’s old Donatella Versace character on SNL: to smoke and look cool. Do you know what the Irvine crowd thought was cool? A special weight you drape across a book to hold its pages open.
Franz Kafka was always telling people that he had made an “unshakable” judgment about Felice Bauer within thirty seconds of meeting her. Within two minutes of this seminar starting, I had come to the unshakable realization that real graduate students had reached new levels of not-giving-a-fuckness about their outward appearances. Of course, my future cohort had also made an unshakable judgment about me: I was a snobby, image-obsessed flake who maligned Los Angeles having never lived there, and my research interests in philosophical approaches to Kafka were somehow both “trendy” and “tired.” When we became friends, I assured them that my snooty facial expression was actually displaying crippling intellectual inadequacy, and they explained to me that in graduate school, dressing like a middle-school guidance counselor in 1993 was a mark of intellectual commitment.
Granted, the irony of my vanity during my campus visit was not lost on me, promising literary scholar that I was. For I had, during the second half of my twenties, aggressively cultivated a look that was supposed to show that I didn’t give a fuck what I looked like. This is because if the fashion world had a Geneva Convention, the early aughts in New York would have violated it, so I chose conscientious objection. Every subway ride displayed a nauseating mélange of three-hundred-dollar whisker-faded jeans that exposed butt cleavage, elbow-length hair blown out ruler-straight, and stilettos whose toes were so pointy, they made the wearer look like the Wicked Witch of the East after the house gets dropped on her. So I invented my own aesthetic based on the last time I was cool, and adopted a late-nineties Berlin fashion ethos of Look Like You Slept in Makeup and Sword-Fought with Your Clothes. I honestly believed that there was nobody on earth who gave less of a fuck about looking attractive than I. But that was before I set foot in a real graduate seminar in German, when I would soon realize that I “didn’t care” about my looks in the same way Gustav von Aschenbach “doesn’t care” about his looks in Death in Venice.
The other crucial cultural truth I learned about grad seminar was that the more confident a student sounded, the fuller of shit he probably was. Shortly thereafter I also learned that the professor, brilliant as she may be, is but a human being who has either written, or is in the process of writing, an article or book on the text you’re discussing, and is testing out her thesis on you. But nobody tells you this when you’re just starting out, so the first day of seminar leaves even the brightest young intellectuals feeling like impostors—or at any rate, that’s how I felt.
I’m not supposed to be here, I thought.
All these people know what they’re talking about, and I most certainly do not.
How can anyone have thought I was smart enough to be here?
What the fuck is a subaltern?
I would kill for a decent bagel.
Oh, God, pay attention! Did someone just say “subaltern” again? Gah.
Impostor Syndrome is like one of those antibiotic-resistant superbugs, in that no matter what remedies you try, it mutates and flares up anew—that is, the second I figured out one difficult thing (thanks to untold hours of reading and intermittent weeping), I immediately decided that that thing must thus be something kindergartners could parse. This went for the entire graduate-school cycle: seminar papers, comprehensive exams, even the dissertation. Soon, it all just seemed like a soup of easy stuff any idiot could do. And I was no outlier—I learned that behavior from what I saw around me. And this, friends, is why so many academics are pompous dickheads, because they are all scared out of their damn minds that someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will come along and recognize that the impostors have been in charge the whole time.
The only antidote to Impostor Syndrome (which is actually not an antidote, but rather, in Kafkan fashion, exacerbates it), is posturing—well, that and eyeball-peeling amounts of work. But I was already doing that, and I still felt like a fake. So all that left was faking it better. Do not ever let anyone know anything is difficult for you, Schuman. I could not betray weakness to anyone, even if that person was allegedly my friend. I could not let on for a second that I felt like a water-treading fraud who was ten seconds from drowning at all times. If someone referenced a book I hadn’t read, I learned to say, “I should really read that again.” (Then I checked that book out and read its introduction, index, and two most relevant chapters for future name-dropping.) If someone asked if I was familiar with a theorist whose name might as well be in Kyrgyz, I just said what everyone else said, which was: “Oh, I haven’t read him since undergrad.” If the person responded, “Actually, Xyvltz Yqctullzxll is a woman,” I dialed it all the way up: “Obviously, but I genderqueer names at random as a performative act. You mean to tell me you don’t?” (I looked the theorist up on the Stanford Encyclopedia later in the privacy of my room, with Law & Order on in the background.) If I had to write a lengthy essay on a subject that perplexed me beyond all reasonable measure, I just gave it a proper academic title so nobody would be the wiser: MILDLY CLEVER THING: Three-Part List, “Incomprehensible Scare Quotes,” and an Extremely Convoluted Explanation with at Least One Made-Up Word. (Then I employed my all-consuming and overly complex essay-writing system, which involved color-coded index cards.) And, when in doubt, I made a reference to Martin Heidegger. Because what better way to counter a bunch of my own gibberish than a bunch of someone else’s gibberish?
I was in an especially good position to become the greatest of grad students, because I took two Heidegger seminars in a row as soon as I arrived in Irvine. Dear old Martin is primarily famous for being an active Nazi, but he is somehow also the unabashed go-to favorite thinker of every progressive literary theorist on earth. He is secondarily famous for schtupping Hannah Arendt. He is tertiarily famous for finding human earth language—even German, with its infinite repository of untranslatable compound words—incapable of expressing the most important ideas of his wide-ranging and prolific philosophical career. As a result, he made up a bunch of his own, such as Dasein (“being-there”), Sein-Zum-Tode (“being-toward-death”) or Zeit-Spiel-Raum (“time-play-space”); Gelassenheit (“released-ness”), Geworfenheit (“thrown-ness”), vorhanden (“present-at-hand”)—and my department chair’s personal favorite, Ereignis, which literally means “event,” but in Heideggerese means something more akin to “a coming-into-view” (i.e., something coming into view—you know, a noun). (Heidegger is 100 percent the German language’s fault.)
The word Ereignis was also, I learned in seminar, pretty much directly relevant to Goethe, who pretty much (almost) used it to describe the German Novelle, or novella. English speakers will call something a “novella” if it’s too long to be a short story but too short to be published on its own, but for Goethe the sole criterion was that it describe one “single unheard-of event,” or sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit. Crash course in what passes for fun in a Ph.D. seminar: the compound adjective Goethe uses here contains the adjectival version of the verb sich ereignen (“to occur”), which is the root of the word Ereignis, and so he and Heidegger were pretty much best friends, even though one of them was born fifty years after the other one died. At any rate, thanks to my department chair’s enthusiasm for orthography (and, I suppose, ontology), I cut my Ph.D. teeth on a seminar about Heidegger and the Novelle, a seminar I took in the winter quarter of my first year that turned my feeble Dasein into what Heidegger might term putty-silliness.
It wouldn’t have been so bad had I not decided to double down on impossible-to-read German philosophers that quarter—but I did, with the only German philosopher who is even more difficult to read than Heidegger: Immanuel Kant, the man whose four-page-long sentences made me yearn for something as simple as a Heideggerian made-up hyphenate. Specifically, I bookended the Heidegger seminar with a course offered by the philosophy department, whose only text was the interminable Critique of Pure Reason. Since the material terrified me and the class was full of people I didn’t know, on the first day, I did what three months of grad-school inculcation had taught me to do: I distinguished myself as a complete pompous posturing twit.
“Do you have a preferred translation we should read?” one of the philosophy students had asked, a guy whom everyone called Jack Osbourne because he looked just like Jack Osbourne.
“That’s a good question,” answered Will, our professor, an awkward and exceedingly kind guy who couldn’t have been more than two years older than me. I didn’t pay attention to the answer he gave, because I was too busy screwing up my courage to ask my own question.
“Yes?” he said.
“Uh,” I said, “do we have to read it in translation?” I tapped nervously on my own ancient used copy of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which I’d snagged for $7.50 at a used bookstore in Oregon over Christmas break.
“Of course not! If you can read it in German, do.”
What I didn’t say was that since reading the Critique of Pure Reason was, to me, like performing a Jazzercise routine in hardening cement, I might as well not-understand it in its original glory. What the rest of the seminar heard was me upping the ante on their sad little monolingual philosopher asses, and for years after that people in the philosophy department would refer to me as the Girl Who Reads Kant in German, protagonist of the world’s most stultifying Stieg Larsson novel.
Luckily for me, the seminar was what the philosophy department called a “piggyback,” a graduate reading group that met as part of an advanced undergraduate course, so I had the good fortune of attending a twice-weekly lecture for younger people that went slowly and used middle-sized words. By the time graduate section each Friday rolled around, I had amassed a passable (if temporary) grasp on “synthetic a priori judgments,” the “transcendental dialectic,” and the “pure concepts of the understanding.” I was thus left free to sit in the seminar circle and space out, as the philosophy graduate students did their goddamnedest to word-salad away whatever tenuous understanding Will’s undergrad lecture might have imparted.
I liked to stare around the room at the faces of my classmates and wonder what these philosophy types were like. By six weeks into the quarter, I’d already made a Kafka-style unshakeable judgment about most of them—Maya the gorgeous Iranian probably belonged in Comp Lit; the guy with the Indiana Jones hat and the old-timey book-strap was a jackass; the Jack Osbourne–looking motherfucker wasn’t a dick, he was just really insecure. (I knew nothing about that.) That didn’t stop me, however, from making my lone contribution to discussion, which was to interrupt him as he pontificated on a passage in which Kant discussed “two modes of understanding” and say: “Well, Brad, in the German, it says zweierlei Erkenntnissart, which literally means ‘twofold mode of understanding,’ and I’m not exactly sure that’s the same thing.” Recommence silent staring. All of this silence and staring, combined with the fact that none of those philosophy people ever talked to me—indeed, some days nobody talked to me at all, and I didn’t talk to anyone else, and I briefly feared that it might be because I was a ghost, and it made me long for some kid who sees dead people to come hang out with me—gave me the decided impression that nobody in philosophy would ever want to hang out with me.
This, it turns out, was not a correct impression—someone in that class did want to hang out with me, but I almost didn’t realize it because of my terrible habit of skipping breakfast. One Friday, about seven weeks into the ten-week winter quarter of my first year—so, mid-February, and thus a perfect and sparkly day of about seventy degrees—the clock somehow managed to strike the 1:00 P.M. start of Kant seminar and I still hadn’t eaten anything. I’d bought a bran muffin, and I was desperate to chomp it down, but nobody else was eating, so I chickened out. Real intellectuals didn’t need any further sustenance than the theory of Apperception, goddammit. By the time the clock inched its way to three, I was what Heidegger might term the Ready-to-eat-my-own-hand.
As I rushed to the door, I noticed that one of my classmates—a strong-jawed silent type who always sat in the back and had recently started showing up with his arm in a sling—had stopped dead in my path. With the muffin halfway to my gaping maw, I damn near ran into him, which would have pushed his slung arm directly into the doorway. Instead I stopped short, said: “Gah! Sorry!” and prepared to maneuver around him, with my food, at long last now, six or seven inches from my quivering yap. He, however, turned to face me and addressed me directly, almost like he knew I existed. “So,” he said, “you’re in the German department?”
“Yes?” I said.
Did he want to have, like, a conversation or something? With me? Why? My mind suddenly entering what Heidegger might call a Disappearing-of-all-smart-talkiness, all I could come up with was the same damn question as everyone else.
“I realize this is probably the last thing you want to talk about,” I said, which is of course an excellent way to begin a conversation, “but what happened?”
“Oh,” he said. “I dislocated my shoulder.” He pointed to the wrist braces I wore for my carpal tunnel syndrome. “What’s with you?”
“This? It’s from too much typing and writing. How did you dislocate your shoulder?”
“I was bodysurfing,” he explained.
“Like, in the ocean?”
“Yep. Big wave caught me and slammed me into the sand.”
I was terrified of the ocean and all the things that could go awry in its merciless salty grasp (most of them shark-related), so I winced and gasped. I also noticed that, arm sling and head grease aside, he looked like a goddamned matinee idol, all broad shoulders and dramatic brow and sensitivity-inflected eye crinkles. Green eyes. Bright ones. How did I not notice this from six weeks of staring? Jack Osbourne’s big fat head must have been in the way. “I’m just impressed that you have time to go to the beach with all the Kant we have to read,” I said.
“Oh, I’m just auditing this course for fun.”
“Excuse me?” Reading the Critique of Pure Reason was like knocking down a brick wall with only my own skull and a ten-gallon bucket full of my tears.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m almost done with my dissertation, which has some chapters on the first Critique. So, you know.”
“Oh, yeah. I know.” I barely knew anyone who had passed their comprehensives, much less almost finished a dissertation, so I did not know.
“Anyway,” he said, “you’re probably right. I should stop spending so much time at the beach and spend more time at home. You know, typing.” He smiled at my bound wrists. I smiled back at his shoulder, snuck only a fleeting glance at my food. “Well,” he said, “my department is having a colloquium, so I should go. Enjoy your muffin.” I hadn’t asked his name, and he hadn’t asked mine.
“Hey,” I said at a party later that night when I ran into Jeff, a philosophy student in the Kant seminar who happened to enjoy the love that dare not speak its name, by which I mean he was going out with someone in the German department, and thus, unlike the rest of his classmates, he had to acknowledge my existence. “Who’s that guy with the greasy hair and the arm sling in your department?” I demanded.
“Oh, you mean VEE-told?” he asked.
“Vee-what?”
“W-I-T-O-L-D. Some European thing. What about him?”
“No reason,” I said nonsensically and a little too fast. “I mean, nothing.”
Jeff went back to his gin and tonic.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s his deal?”
“I don’t really know,” he answered. “He’s not in my department. He’s in that Logic and Philosophy of Science program, where they hate Hegel and insist that all ‘philosophy’ is really math or something. They’re weird. Witold is, like, a sixth year or something.”
Sequestered once again in my hermetic study chamber before bed, I performed the kind of perfunctory cyber-stalk available to the masses in 2006: I looked him up on his department website—his picture was devastating—and then cross-referenced that with Friendster. According to his department profile, Witold Romanoff was an NYU alum as well—and on Friendster he listed his hometown as New York City. Ach, we already had so much in common and he didn’t even know it. He was listed as “single,” and his favorite TV show was The Simpsons. (As long as he meant the pre-2000 Simpsons, this was excellent.) His “research interests” were a bunch of gobbledygook that made my eyes glaze over. (Also acceptable; all graduate students’ “research interests” are gibberish.) One of his Friendster “testimonials” proclaimed: “Witold is more into simplicity than anyone I’ve ever known. He’d have to try to be less put-upon than he is, which would defeat the purpose.” Uh-oh. Did that mean he prized simplicity in others? I was asking for no reason.
No, seriously, I was asking for no reason. The week after the Muffin Conversation, Witold apparently came to his senses and determined that sitting through two hours of Jack Osbourne and Indiana Jones butchering the Transcendental Dialectic was not, actually, fun, and he stopped auditing the Kant seminar. We crossed paths on campus every week or so, as our routes to and from class intersected between UCI’s different retrofuturistic edifices, but that was cause for little more than a flicker of recognition and a nod (from me, I mean; I am very cool. I managed not to yell out HELLO HOT LOGICIAN WITH WEIRD NAME, I AM ALSO FROM NEW YORK, WELL NOT REALLY BUT I USED TO LIVE THERE, SO, YOU KNOW—WAIT, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? So I pretty much deserve a trophy). Eventually, my seminar papers eclipsed all other pursuits; the one about Heidegger and Heinrich von Kleist was just called “—,” after the “substantive Nothing” that allows the “unheard-of event” of sexual assault to take place in The Marquise of O, so it was obviously very important. I forgot all about the hot logician with the weird name.
One day shortly after the start of the spring quarter of my first year in Irvine—thirteen months after the Schillerian-genius actor had broken up with me; not that I was counting—I was in the midst of a severely undermotivated elliptical-trainer workout at the student gym, and I caught sight of Witold talking to some girl. No fair! I thought. Didn’t the hot logician with the weird name understand that I was mulling him over still? And so, since he was conveniently standing somewhere in the general vicinity of the cubby where I had stashed my student ID and keys, I swerved on over to say hello under that completely feasible pretense. He paused, taking in my ratty workout pants. (They were from one of those ill-begotten early-aughts velour tracksuits that everyone wore out to legitimate establishments because they cost two hundred dollars. Mine were knockoffs.) His eyes then swept my excellent New Kids on the Block shirt (vintage 1988, worn in pretend-irony but actual fandom), and alighted upon my visage, which he appeared not to recognize. After ten eternities, he finally said hey. Victory! Once at my cubby, I realized I had nothing to do there—I was actually planning on returning to the elliptical to make my workout a full eighteen minutes—so I pretended to futz with my stuff and then bolted for the drinking fountain.
Once I returned to the machine, however, I noticed that Witold had extricated himself from conversation with the other girl—my nemesis!—and was walking in my general direction. Toward me? Maybe. Possibly not, as behind me stood all of the gym’s other equipment, and it is entirely probable that he was there to exercise and not to search, day after day and with a longing beyond human words, for the mythical Girl Who Reads Kant in German, whose name he didn’t know and whose tender overworked carpal tunnels he had mocked so roundly. But I already looked like an overeager jackass, so I figured I might as well try for a conversation that involved neither injuries nor breakfast goods. I made eye contact and ripped out an earbud as he passed me by—but just one, you know, keeping it mysterious.
“How’s it going?”
He looked surprised. “Not bad,” he answered. “Taking any more philosophy courses this quarter?”
Excellent. He did remember me. Because I am unforgettable. Obviously. “Well, in my Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment course in the German department, we’re reading a lot of Johann Georg Hamann,” I offered, referring to a little-known Kant antagonist who disputed the very idea of “pure reason” with the extremely cogent assertion that language must precede thought, because all language is metaphorical approximation of the language of the angels. “Does that count?”
He managed a small smile. I returned to watching the seconds count backward on my elliptical machine. But he hadn’t left yet.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you know Eli Bergman?”
Of course I did; Eli was the German linguistics professor in my department, which was small enough that you could count all faculty and grad students on two hands.
“I took an undergraduate class from him last quarter,” said Witold. “You know, for—”
“—let me guess, fun? I have to say, you have a somewhat bizarre concept of fun.”
“I was going to say, to improve my German, which I need for my research.”
That made a little more sense. All of the philosophers Witold researched, he explained, wrote in German.
“What, Heidegger?”
He smiled. “More like Frege.” I would soon learn that exactly no analytic philosophers read Heidegger—not even for alleged fun—and that simply by not floating out of the nearest window on a miniature dirigible powered by his own smugness, Witold was proving to be among the nicest philosophers in the world. Meanwhile, the guy he was talking about, Gottlob Frege (I discovered via Dr. Wikipedia half an hour later), was the founder of first-order symbolic logic, otherwise known as the math class everyone in college takes when they don’t want to take math (except it pretty much is math; burn). I had never heard that name in my life—as far as I knew it could be spelled Freyga, and he could have been Estonian or something, and just written in German for kicks. But, now having two entire quarters of graduate school behind me, I behaved accordingly, which is to say I nodded sagely.
“Anyway,” Witold said, “in Eli’s class we read Der Verschollene.”
I was impressed—most Anglophones used the English name for Kafka’s least-known novel, Amerika. “I really liked it,” he said. “Every sentence was like its own adventure.”
That might have been the most exactly correct thing I’d ever heard, and from a fucking amateur, no less. And then, Witold opened his mouth and these words came out of it: “Do you like Kafka?” Did this person seriously just ask this question? So overwhelmed was I with the different options of expressing how much I did, indeed, like Kafka that my brain coagulated into a dollop of goo, of the sort the frat guy on the elliptical next to me had slathered liberally into his hair. So I did what I always do when I’m overwhelmed, which is make the worst choice possible. (This is why, if I make the error of entering a New York City bodega hungry, I will always, always exit with a bag of Bugles.)
I hopped down off the elliptical machine, which, let’s face it, was little more than an unwieldy prop covered in undergrad germs, and with no prelude whatsoever, I lifted up the back of my NKOTB shirt far enough for him to see that two-inch-high K. I’d had inked on the small of my back when I was living in Williamsburg in 1999, nihilistic and jubilant to be free of a bad relationship.
“I,” I said, “have a tattoo.” Witold cleared his throat.
“Well, I’m, uh, interested in reading more by Kafka in German,” he said. “Do you have anything to recommend?”
“I would be honored to make you an itemized list,” I said, approximately seventy-five times faster than I had heretofore been exercising. “Annotated, of course. I’ll try not to make it too long. I’ll just put the best stuff on there. I promise. Just the best stuff. A list!”
“Sure,” he said. “Oh,” he added, as I returned to my nominal evening of exercise, “what’s your name?”
Two excruciatingly paced days later, I got his e-mail address off the Logic and Philosophy of Science website and thanked the thousand spires of Prague that academics are so easy to stalk. I began composing the first volley of a full-court e-mail charm offensive—and they said the years I spent studying Kafka’s letters to Milena and Felice were wasted—but then I realized two things. One: If I wrote in German, that would be both more charming and excellent pretense for corresponding all quarter, because Witold wanted to work on his German, right? I’d be a free tutor and all he’d have to do was pay attention to me. Two: I still hadn’t asked his name, so he was going to realize I’d looked him up. All the more reason to write in German; I made sure the sentence wherein I admitted to having asked Jeff his name was extremely convoluted and possibly above his level (or, at any rate, enough of “its own little adventure” that he’d enjoy reading it so much that he’d have to give me a chance). After much agonizing, I explained to him, I would like to recommend the following Kafka works, with the following annotations:
The Trial, his best-known work, although a bit more difficult than Der Verschollene and it drags a bit in the middle; also, DID YOU KNOW that the order of its chapters is an editorial reconstruction, because Kafka never finished it and skipped all over the place in his notebook?
“In the Penal Colony,” short story of about thirty-five pages about a torture machine; extremely violent and bloody, several possible allegorical parallels to the industrial revolution. (P.S.: DO NOT pay attention to ANYONE who compares this story to the HOLOCAUST because it was written in 1915! They do NOT know what they’re talking about!)
“A Hunger Artist,” short story about a guy who starves himself for sport but nobody comes to see him anymore. Very sad.
“A Country Doctor,” I bet you can guess what it’s about. Gross scene depicting an open wound full of worms. Common assignment in upper-level German courses for undergraduates.
“The Bucket Rider,” possible critique of capitalism. Two pages long.
“The Judgment,” about a guy and his dad and their pretty bad relationship; odd sex joke at the end.
“Contemplations,” my personal favorite, collection of few dozen paragraph-length mini-stories, all enchanting. Favorites: “The Trees,” “The Next Village,” “Resolutions.”
Several agonizing days later, my breath caught in the back of my throat as the name Witold Romanoff appeared in my inbox, with a message composed in careful German, thanking me very much for my suggestions and saying that he would choose The Trial, because he happened to own it already. (Oh, how the tables had turned since 1993.) Would I, he wrote, like to get together and talk about it when he finished? Of course! I wrote back, while thinking God DAMMIT, man, why did you have to choose the longest and most difficult of all those things? “A Country Doctor” is six pages long! “The Trees” is THREE SENTENCES! We could be discussing it NOW! By the time you get through the interminable Lawyer-Manufacturer-Painter chapter it’s going to be 2010! Gah!
I had to think of something. Handsome, nice, well-adjusted, not-jerkish, not-pompous single male graduate students were rare enough at UC-Irvine that I’d spent all year there without running across one. (Not that I’d been looking. Heidegger was all the boyfriend I needed.) But still, hadn’t I already seen at least one other girl making a move? Possibly an undergraduate, who of course would lack my intellectual gravitas and life experience but in their place would have youth, which at the decrepit age of twenty-nine I sincerely believed I no longer possessed? It was entirely possible that by the time Witold finished The Trial, he could have impregnated that girl, and they’d be moved into family housing, and I’d see him pushing a stroller down the bike path and pretend not to know him.
What could I possibly have to offer Witold the hot logician with the weird name that an undergraduate girl did not? I did a quick scan around my room: Improperly hung black curtains to block out the merciless morning sun? Possibly. A minifridge full of hard cider and Becherovka, a spicy-sweet Czech liqueur that is supposed to cure all ailments? Maybe, but the undergrads probably had Jell-O shots in their minifridges, and also no cellulite. What did I have that could possibly override cellulite?
My eyes finally alighted upon a DVD of Triumph of the Will sitting on top of my TV, floor model tube set I’d talked the guy at Best Buy into selling me for fifty-two dollars. I’d seen Triumph of the Will before—or at least I’d convincingly pretended to—but I was supposed to watch it “again” as an assignment for my Violence and Modernism course. So, here was what I had to offer. Would anyone else, ever, think to ask someone on a first date to view the world’s most famous Nazi propaganda film, helmed by the world’s most famous person who never returned my fax? It was worth a shot. In the invitation I sent, I matter-of-factly included the sentence Hier ist meine Telefonnummer, like it was a business necessity and not a substantial overture, a feat made entirely possible by the majestic default officiousness of the German vernacular. (A pretty fair trade-off for Heideggerese, I supposed.)
And it worked! Witold called. Later that week, I dragged my friend Eileen away from her fifteenth reading of Johann Georg Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce to come help me pick the perfect outfit for my nebulous maybe-date. (“Put down the ‘angel speak’ and come give me some ‘human speak’ about how to do my hair, please,” I implored.) We sat on the foot of my bed watching Law & Order and drinking hard pear cider from my minifridge; I figured I’d have one or two while I was waiting for the hot logician with the weird name to show, and then the two of us would clear out the rest of my stash while we heckled Nazis—and then we’d, you know, see what happened. By the time the doorbell of my prefab student apartment rang, I was a few ciders deep as I left Eileen in my room and elbowed my roommate and Elena out of the way to get to the door. (Wonderful women both, but third-date introductions for sure.)
As the door swung open, my slightly buzzed brain immediately began doing calculations: Clean shirt (yes). Scraggly week-old stubble (no). Came bringing something (yes). Came bringing a half-eaten bag of Trader Joe’s cookies (no). To be fair, said cookies were a special kind of chocolate-dipped macaroon only available at certain Southern California Trader Joe’s during the years of 2005–2008, and they were spectacular, but I didn’t know this yet. So when he said, quite gamely and cleverly, “I thought macaroons would be a good companion to Nazi propaganda,” because it was Jewish food, because he, like me, is part Jewish, I was so busy wondering why he didn’t like me enough to shave his face that I didn’t even appreciate the joke, and I forgot about the macaroons entirely.
I tried to beat back the tide of panic that was rising in my torso. Eileen was still in my room at this point, as per my instructions, so that it would be apparent that I was cool and popular and had many exciting engagements per evening from which to choose. “Hello,” she said, like a normal person.
“This is Eileen!” I interjected. “She’s in the German department with me. She is my friend. WE ARE FRIENDS.”
She gave me a duly impressed look as she showed herself out. All right, so not the effervescent demonstration of my popularity I’d hoped, but I still had one more armament in the Schuman arsenal of seduction: minifridge. “Can I offer you something to drink?” I asked.
“I’ll just take some water,” he said.
Oh, no. “Wait,” I said, “check out what I have, and then tell me if you just want water.”
I opened it with a flourish to show off my collection of hard ciders, Trader Joe’s brand Hefeweizen, Becherovka, vodka, and two Vitamin Waters.
“Really,” he said. “Water’s fine.”
Fuck. Had I misjudged the entire evening? Was he planning on chugging a perfunctory sip of agua and politely watching ten minutes of Heinrich Himmler prancing around out of politeness, before running off to go on his real date of the night? Because he was too nice to say nein outright to the Girl Who Reads Kant in German, with the big sad staring eyes and the gnarled wrist tendons? Was this a carpal tunnel syndrome pity date? I supposed there was only one way to find out. I at least had the wherewithal to switch to Vitamin Water, and I popped in the movie as Witold perused my bookshelf, removed his jacket (he’d been living in California long enough to wear a jacket outdoors at night, which I still refused to do), and made himself comfortable at the foot of my bed, which was the best and also only place to watch my television.
As the never-ending opening credits of Triumph des Willens played—twenty years after the World War … sixteen years after the beginning of German suffering … nineteen months after Germany’s rebirth—the pear cider wore off, and Witold and I slipped into conversation. Riefenstahl’s creepy masterpiece is, after all, dialogue-free for long stretches (unless you count the roar of seven hundred thousand people yelling Heil Hitler)—thus, although it was somewhat strange to have der Führer smiling creepily at his teenaged fans as a backdrop, the movie afforded plenty of opportunity for us to begin getting to know each other.
Witold had been born and raised in Brooklyn, the oldest child of Polish immigrants. His father was also named Witold. His parents had had sincere plans to name their firstborn son Michael, an unobtrusive American name that nobody would ever misspell or mispronounce. Once he was born, however, his father took one look at him, naked and covered in slime (Witold left out this part, but I think it’s important not to romanticize childbirth), and became so overcome with emotion that he decided to give the boy his own name, despite the playground taunts, butchering, and general onerousness that would surely follow. “I hated my name when I was a kid,” Witold said. “I went by Willy for all of middle school. Now that I’m an adult, though, I like it.” I liked it, too. We talked about everything in the world but graduate school: Disneyland (which he hated); the beach (which he loved); vegetarian food (which we both ate); this one bodega near the NYU campus that makes terrible sandwiches (which we both remembered); and the time that I was rearranging my bag on the subway platform to accommodate one of said terrible sandwiches and dropped my wallet right onto the tracks, and when I got it back I felt lucky but also kind of pissed because the sandwich had, of course, been awful. Bodega food was terrible, we agreed, but we missed every single one of those bodegas anyway, because there was nowhere in Irvine with any character. He mentioned the fact that Irvine left him feeling “dead inside” with such gentleness and good humor that I almost didn’t realize what he meant. I quickly forgot that we weren’t drinking—in fact, I quickly forgot about everything, including my Kramer-style neighbor Elena, who poked her sweaty head in around 1:00 A.M. to tell us to “keep it down.” This was not because we were being loud, but because our regular-volume conversation was drowning out the voices in her head.
I excused myself to the bathroom and beckoned her to follow so she would not be left alone with Witold to find out that he studied the philosophy of math, and thus would ostensibly want to hear all about her dissertation plans, which involved Henri Bergson and “like, fractals and stuff; I don’t know, the math shit will be easy, I’ll figure it out later.”
“You’ve got to cool it down in there,” she said as I washed my hands.
“Get your mind out of the gutter! We’re just talking.”
“No,” she said. “I mean you’re laughing, like, way too much and way too hard. I can hear it from my apartment. It sounds really overeager. Like, be cool, Rebecca. Be cool.”
I splashed some water on my face. “First off,” I said, “I’m not cool, so I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression. And also, this happens to be what I sound like when I’m happy. Which probably seems unusual because you’ve never heard it before.”
By the time Witold left with a chaste hug, it managed not to send me into paroxysms of insecurity because it was four in the morning, and I figured that even the nicest Polish New Yorkers with weird names would probably find reason to extricate themselves from a hellish garbage nightmare situation before the break of day, if they so desired. After he walked out the door, I noticed that he’d left that light California jacket by my bookshelf. Score! A George Costanza–type leave-behind. We’d even talked about Seinfeld, so, obvious. I had no choice but to e-mail him to arrange a handoff, which then facilitated the procurement of a second date—this time to view my second-favorite documentary, Hell House, which is about a conservative evangelical church’s haunted house of sin. This date involved no alcohol whatsoever, also ended at four in the morning, and didn’t end in a hug.
For those next few months in 2006, which then turned into years that spooled out after 2006 like so much sun-baked Orange County asphalt, Witold and I ended up having quite a few small adventures with each other, sometimes even setting out into the dread OC on purpose: to the Borat movie at the mall we called “the Speculum,” where it took us half an hour to find a parking space and I was just happy to spend the time with him; to an Indian restaurant in Tustin where the food was so spicy that I had a beet-red face for two days afterward; on a series of increasingly subversive walks in our unwalkable neighborhood, one of which had us scrambling along for an hour in a drainage ditch; on a road trip to Los Angeles on a gloriously clear day, where we sat in the garden of the Getty Museum talking for so long that the guard had to come kick us out; to many mornings and afternoons spent on the beach, some even in the frigid, terrifying water, where he demonstrated how to jump into the waves head-on so that they couldn’t smash me down on the sand (he’d learned that, of course, the hard way).
By March of my second year of grad school, I was no longer scared by Martin Heidegger or admitting I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and Witold and I had been going out for almost a year, so I was also no longer scared that nobody would ever love me again. And then, my family experienced a sudden and traumatic event—an Ereignis, if you will. My grandfather drowned in a canoeing accident. On the surface, if you hear someone explain that her ninety-four-year-old grandpa just passed away, it doesn’t sound shocking—but the grandpa in your mind’s eye is not my grandpa, who still went canoeing every day, who built entire tree houses in an hour, whose bare adoration of his grandchildren could power a small train. Every kid thinks her grandpa is immortal, but it’s rare that a thirty-year-old adult believes this to be so with such tenacity—because her grandfather, who has survived Nazis, and heart disease, and even an unfortunate dalliance with two-week-old corned beef, goddamned near was immortal. Before I had to leave for a three-day trip to Chicago for the funeral, Witold drove us to the beach and sat with me while I looked out on the water and thought about drowning, with his arm around me, staring out at those waves.
As he dropped me off at the airport later, he told me he admired what he called my “stubborn insistence” on facing my grief directly. When I returned, he picked me up, and we drove home as the setting sun turned the sky a vibrant purplish pink. I was exhausted from sadness, from so many grieving Schumans in one place, and from withstanding the mind-bogglingly tone-deaf insistence of my cousin’s asshole husband that we get together again someday when I wasn’t “so stressed out.” (“I am not stressed out,” I told that fucker. “My grandfather just died. I’m sad.”) As we drove on, and the sky and the burnt desert hills around us grew brighter and then darker, I began to feel the first stirrings of relief, of knowledge that yes, my immortal grandpa was dead and it had ripped a gaping and permanent hole into my family, but somehow, with enough care and gentleness from the people who loved me, old and new, I would be all right eventually. “I don’t know what it is,” Witold said, as we stopped at a traffic light, “but these past months I’ve been feeling a lot more alive.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”
We drove in silence for two more stoplights—so, it being Orange County, three more miles—and watched the sky soften together.
It was, I thought but didn’t say aloud, a moment of pure human joy, just coming into view.