I have never been so alive to the misfortunes of being a student. One of the classes I'm enrolled in is called Ethical and Professional Issues, and purports to deal with ethical and professional issues, when all it in fact is is an experiment to see how far they can push students before they do something unspeakable. The only thing remotely pertaining to ethics I have gained from that class is the realization that I am even more amoral than before, along with the concomitant realization that such a thing was possible. The professor stands there at the front of the classroom every Monday at 10 AM, and declaims in his staid, hieratical manner the week's banalities, as detailed in a textbook written by a dimwit named Tavani, who is no closer to being an authority on ethical issues than he is to getting his pronouns right; but not before the TA, a soft-spoken girl with penciled eyebrows and a most annoying face, has spent the first hour (9-10 AM) encouraging everyone to "come to a consensus" on some nonsense issue she fished out of the mephitic waters of the Internet, and present it to the rest of the class in "small groups of five to ten people".
For most individuals of high intelligence--myself included, of course--the initial farce would of itself be a big enough blow to their pride so that they would simply be unequal to the task of sitting through the second hour of the class; and few do. Then, out of the blue, the professor announces with a huge grin on his face that he would not be posting lecture slides online to help us hapless wanderers on the Eightfold Path to prepare for the final. He says it's to reward those who bothered staying for his lecture every week. But whatever. I'm not going to prostrate myself before him, and beg him to see reason--to remove the blindfold with which his single-minded pursuit of morals has covered his eyes. Besides, there's a "final project", which involves lying in the form of an eight-minute presentation, to worry about. Then again, it might just prove a chance to overwhelm the course staff with my exacting and, in an age in which intellectuals in America are so extravagant in their insistence on groupthink and pretending to care about humanity at large, blasphemous air of dignity, and teach them that we followers of the True Enlightenment don't take lightly to having final exams and projects thrust upon us in a class in which, just the previous semester, there was none.
Happily, I am making progress on other fronts of my varied and exciting life. I am now three pages into Liszt's Valleé d'Obermann from the first book of Anées de pèlerinage, a singularly fantastic composition that is sadly only too underplayed. Whoever said Liszt couldn't develop a theme must have drowned in his own stupidity by now. It's plangent, pensive, and profound. The coda is exciting, exalting, and electrifying (I needed a third word that began with e); and the whole thing seems to be pretty comfortably within my technical grasp (i..e., no complex textures, fast runs, or counterpoint). At this rate I should be able to learn the whole thing in just a few weeks--if I didn't have to worry about finals. I have five finals in May, of which the abovementioned EPI is lamentably one. Incidentally, I am also enrolled in PHIL 105, which is also about ethics, and is infinitely more fun and useful.
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