Nay, I have done. (Have I?)
Since ther’s no helpe, Come let us kisse and part,
Nay, I have done: You get no more of Me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly, I my Selfe can free.
Shake hands for ever, Cancell all our Vowes,
And when we meet at any time againe,
Be it not seene in either of our Browes
That We one jot of former Love reteyne;
Now at the last gaspe, of Loves latest Breath,
When his Pulse fayling, Passion speechlesse lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of Death,
And Innocence is closing up his Eyes,
Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From Death to Life, thou might’st him yet recover.— Michael Drayton, Idea, sonnet 61
Oddly enough, given that it’s what I wrote my dissertation about, I don’t write about Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry very often in this blog. But Michael Drayton is deeply underrated as a poet, and I’ve had a fondness for this particular sonnet for ages. At times when I’m on the verge of stepping away from something, I find that it pops into my head, especially the second line. (It’s a bit like blasting "I Will Survive" after breaking up with someone.) That line has been in my head a lot lately: I walk through the department where I got my Ph.D., or along Collegeville’s main street, inwardly reciting "Nay, I have done: you get no more of me." And for the most part I am indeed glad, yea, glad. But I was thinking today that I’m also drawn to the ambivalence in the final six lines. Clean breaks are remarkably difficult to make, after all, even when you know that they’re better for all concerned. And my break with academia has just become rather more imminent than I was expecting.
Long story short: I found out today that I didn’t get the lectureship I recently applied for so I’d have a stopgap measure for next year. I’m not completely without employment prospects, but come September I’ll need something else to supplement my current part-time job with the digital text project. I’m still waiting to find out about one other possibility, but I won’t know about that for another couple of weeks, probably. The news made for a short burst of complete panic, followed by sadness at yet another rejection: oh NO what now nobody wants me waaaaah. Followed by steely determination: well, now I’ve got a good reason to get out. Followed by abject terror: what if there are no other jobs around here at all?
I’ve calmed down since then. All this means is that the transition will happen sooner rather than later. I have enough savings to get by, if I have to, on the part-time job for a couple of months after my lecturer’s salary stops coming in at the end of the summer. There’s time to see if I can find something for the short term. As for the long term, I don’t know. Today I was thinking, not for the first time, about moving back east, closer to where my family and pre-grad-school friends are. Now that I’m finished my degree, and now that I no longer have a teaching job, there’s very little to keep me here in Collegeville. I miss urban surroundings, being on the Amtrak corridor, and seeing actual sunlight in the winters (and, consequently, not feeling like a depressed lump from November through March).
The end of this term is going to be weird, though. I wonder if I’ll end up telling my students that it’s my last semester of teaching, and that when April is over, I’ll have finally left school.
Maybe the theme song shouldn’t be "I Will Survive," but the finale from "Once More, with Feeling": "Where Do We Go from Here?"
Addendum: As I was finishing this entry, I went over to the Invisible Adjunct’s site only to discover that this is her last term of teaching too, and, far more sadly for the rest of us, the end of her blog. Godspeed, IA. The academic blogosphere won’t be the same. Now I’m doubly sad.
Good luck. I’m sure you’ll be fine. 🙂 don’t give up the blog too!
Yes — keep the blog going. It will keep you sane. (And give us something to read! 😉 )
Having gone through something similar, though not with as much foresight as you, you have both my sympathies and my hope that you’ll find it exciting (in a good way). Myself, I seem to have settled into a state of relative inaction; I’m now trying to revive my sense of new opportunities that I had when the shock was still new (but without the attendant worries about money and future).
I say tell your students. It’s good for them to know these things. The good ones will respond kindly and intelligently; the others won’t care. Some of my best conversations with students were those I had with seniors about how scary and exciting an uncertain future can be.
Coming back to visit the academic world, after a time away, is like visiting a place from your childhood: everything looks smaller than you remembered it. There are some lovely things about the academic world, but I don’t think I’d go back, now, even if they’d have me. “You get no more of me,” indeed.
Time for fresh fields and pastures new.
When a friend breaks up with someone you never cared for, you can finally say, “You know, I never thought he was good enough for you.” Likewise I can say now that I never thought collegeville college deserved you — you have too bright a spirit, too spacious a mind.
Not an easy decision, but one which I can relate to well enough. I hope you keep your blog going. I enjoy “your voice” a lot.
Thanks for the encouragement! And yes, I’m keeping the blog. I seem to be in no danger of shutting up any time soon. 🙂