That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.
Saturday: May 3rd [1958]... Tomorrow I must correct all my exams which I should do in one day- they're short and all on the same subject. Then a close outline of The Wasteland which should take all week. I pick up my ms. of poetry & leaf through it, unable to invent, to create- all my projected nostalgia for my students can't shake the conviction that teaching is a smiling public-service vampire that drinks blood and brain without a thank you.
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house, there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
What did I want? I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, 'The game's afoot!' I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance — for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be — and I had known it — and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
