Meditations #20

 Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Six

I've just completed the first week of the beginning of my thirty-first year of full-time university teaching (actually, you could stretch that out a few more years because I was teaching a full-time adjunct load, but it was thirty-one years ago that I began to get things like, oh, benefits and healthcare; once again, let's hope that this generation is smart enough to break that terrible link between employment and healthcare). This is a line that I've quoted to my students for years and years, and, truthfully, there can't be many more important lessons than this one. A couple years ago I put in a proposal to teach a first year class based on the Meditations but it did not make the list. At this point in my career I think I'm mainly just viewed by my colleagues as that fossilized remnant of an age thankfully past, someone who willfully and foolishly refuses to die or retire; that professor who thinks students should read the Meditations or Journey to the West or Crime and Punishment.