3: "Thursday Philosophy" [Now With More Paragraphs!]

I met Sergio soon after arriving. He studies philosophy at UADER, a third-year student. He’s from a small village in Entre Ríos and rents a room from a family here in Paraná. He works construction on weekends to help with rent. Our classes are in the same building – the Escuela Normal – so we’ve been bumping into each other here and there.

Last weekend he went back home to help his family get ready for winter. He said they slaughter a cow and preserve the meat, making salami and such. I asked if I could go with next time and see it. He said sure, they’d be doing more in the next few weeks.

We’ve gotten the habit of meeting on Thursdays. I have a conversation class at three in the afternoon, then literature at four. He has mythology at seven, so we’ve been meeting in between, drinking mate, eating churros, talking. His friend Darío has come along, too. He’s another phil major who also has mythology at seven o’clock.

The afternoons are getting cooler as the fall’s coming, and it’s hard to find a warm place to go where you don’t have to buy something. But it’s still enough to sit outside in the patio of the school. They’ve brought a chocolate liquor the past couple weeks, to sip on between the yerba. Maybe that helps.

This week I brought a translation I made of a Times op-ed, a letter from Mark Taylor at Columbia. It’s called “End the University as We Know It”.

It says grad school is the Detroit of academia, that grad students are being duped and ripped off and hyperspecialized off into irrelevance. Taylor wants to mix everything up: end tenure, create alt dissertations, have problem-solving programs instead of discipline-centered departments.

Sergio really liked this when I mentioned it to him last week, so I wrote up my Spanish version of it. He read it aloud, fixing my rare or wrong usage as he went, snapping the sheet of paper in skeptical delight when he got to line about “ever-increasing specialization”.

He brought the Argentine version of Le Monde diplomatique – el Dipló, as it’s called. It’s got translations of the French and some local articles and notes. He showed me an article about a six-day sit-in in Chicago last winter, at Republic Windows & Doors.

I had never heard about it.

I talked about my ideas for the lecture I’m giving in a week, about interpretation and wonder, about what happens when we stop beholding something and start thinking about it, abstracting it. When we got up to leave I asked a question that’d struck me lately – that if the lack of Spanish philosophy has something to do with the Inquisition and kicking the Protestants out of Spain.