Week 1: Not like riding a bicycle

Last week was the first time since 1972 that I did not have to go to school. I finally left school. Possibly to return in the near future. Maybe. But I think that school left me first so I guess we are even.
I will miss school. No, I will not miss school. I will miss the students. And my colleagues. I will miss my open door policy and all the queries, chats, laments, confessions, complaints, accusations, rants that it encouraged and legitimised in the intimate context of speaker and listener, a transient and momentary complicity that validated teachers' feelings and made individuals visible.
I would like to blog about my unrequited love for school but it would sound contrived with resonances from The Sorrows of Young Werther; The Sorrows of a Middle-Aged Educator or Kafka on the Shore; Dr A. on the Bike.. It would be a reading chore, a bore, to rehash the cliched give-and-take discourse, the journey-vs-the-destination argument, the individualist/collectivist debate. But I do love school. I did and I do love school that is a reincarnated, a reimagined town square where citizens come together with their unique voices in symphony to articulate a future vision, to heal and to foster love for peace, respect and equality. 
Now I will take a break from the education of others and invest in the education of my self. The last time my life was focused solely and entirely on *my* education was in my twenties. And back then the existential angst and the fear of living conspired to withhold the climax of the lust for learning and awareness. I will relish catching up with the news over coffee in the morning and I will read voraciously. I will maintain my professional role and persona without the anxiety and the desperation of a broken heart. After half a century on this wretched earth I feel I have license to stop and ponder and reflect on and mull over events, sensations, ideas, thoughts and feelings.
One of my resolutions during this period of suspended activity, uninterrupted introspection and undisturbed focus is to blog about my readings and about education. The last couple of weeks I read Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Cazalet Chronicles, Gloria Steinem's My Life on the Road and Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring, but Brain Pickings is already out there and I do not feel ready yet to give the experience the physical dimension of language. Suffice it to say it has been profoundly delightful and rewarding, but it has not been easy to return to a mental state of complete detachment from schedule, routine, and work, to practise immersive attention and to fend off the sirens of connectivity.
Still, the most significant accomplishment of my first week off school has been to fall off my stationary bike. A laughable incident indeed, but totally predictable considering I was trying to climb on it while holding my Kindle in a way that I would not touch the screen and lose my place. To what extent is a huge bruise on my thigh more threatening and painful than "subjective dispersal and discontinuity"? 

Werther is middle-aged

The doctor benched me for a few days. I did try to tell him that it wouldn't do anybody any good, but he had a point. Anyway, doctor's orders left me with a little time on my hands, which only activated that giga-tiny voice of restless mental preoccupation that resides somewhere in my brain (and/or mind). The result? At 11pm on a Saturday evening i was in the library checking out Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as part of a second-reading on-going project.
I read the book a quarter of a century ago. As soon as i finished the Goethe original, i went on to read Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, a book that was for me a revelation, at that time. What Barthes did in his book was to simulate the lover's discourse, by a process that involved the I of the lover without the crutches of a metalanguage for the presentation of the consciousness of the amorous subject. Barthes's A Lover's Discourse had a profound effect on me, as it legitimized the consciousness of the amorous subject as a practically self-defining entity and confirmed the ultimate alone-ness of the lover. I had personal reasons to identify with the amorous subject, especially when the license to identify came from no other than Barthes himself.
My second reading of Werther is very different; a quarter of a century later, young Werther seems neurotic and narcissistic. I have yet to decide whether he is mourning the loss of the loved object (which he never had) or the impoverishment of his ego. But it's not really the second reading that comes as a shock to me; after all, my ToK students did 'accuse' me recently of believing that love is just another brain chemical. It's the total disparity of my two readings that i find shocking.
Interestingly (and in my defense), Goethe distanced himself from Werther, a work that brought him fame and success. It is possible that the autobiographical elements of the work were a source of embarrassment for Goethe after Werther became popular. Or maybe the middle-aged Goethe had to distance himself from Werther which did not show "the mastery that is revealed only in limitation, the freedom that law alone can give us."
Maybe by writing this entry, i am trying to distance myself from my first reading without any embarrassment, justified or not, about how i felt back then since, to quote Goethe, "it must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him" (or her, i add).
Having just passed the Goethe test, all i need now is for the doctor to let me play ball again. With my students, not with Werther and myself.