They’re oddly frozen in action. Guns out, hands up, grenades in mid-throw, the men at my elbow are forever waging a static war. The handful of dark green toy soldiers rally around a tiny plastic Canadian flag in a way I have seen few men do. They line up on the side table, a tiny formation trapped on one side by the dense foliage
printed on the cardboard wall of the Kleenex box, hemmed in on the other by a borrowed edition of E.B. White’s essays. The boldest soldier is about to charge out of the trench, scaling the dictionary that dwarfs him.

Beside and beneath their military fortifications, on the floor and the shelves, in the chairs and the closets, across the kitchen table, atop the fridge and even between the sheets, are books. Thin books, fat books, red and yellow, black and white books. Books on art history and fi lmography, literary criticism and aestheticism, linguistics and philosophy critics. It’s not that I’m so well-read. It’s that I’ve accumulated. It’s that I am now
forced to research to accessorize my profound ignorance. It’s that I’m “in my fourth year” and live with
two other “fourth-years.”

At university we say this with a certain weight, with a certain travel-weary yet significant note. It’s the tired yet somewhat heroic tone of the mother-to-be.

“What month are you?”

“I’m in my ninth month.”

“Oooh!”

I’m anticipating month ten.

The smugness is completely wiped from my face. “I’m in my fourth year,” I say. And then in a rush to forestall any congratulations or questions of life calling, “…but I’m taking a fifth year.” After which follows a rather painfully gratuitous explanation of changed majors and an honours thesis and other things I will not bore you with here.

But I may delay you a little longer with more maternity stories, that dreaded topic of not a few ladies’ church events in my not-so-distant childhood. Have I told you about my dad? Dad was almost a month late as a baby. My tiny five-foot-two grandmother summoned all her Scotch resolve and spent a morning climbing stairs till he got the point and decided it was as good a day as any to be born. Sometimes I think my grandmother and I have a lot in common. Some days I think, “Show me the stairs.” I want to climb to the top of this trench and charge over, despite the firestorm that awaits. Regardless of how hard the homeless infant of a graduate may
wail on the other side of this birth, I want that homeless, jobless baby born already.

Other days I don’t want to leave the womb. It’s simply too cozy. There are many things I’ve grown to love in my intellectual wonderland. I love the chair on the other side of the desk, the one facing the professor’s. I love walls usurped by books, shimmering through faculty windows like some stage set painted on too brightly. I love boards filled with phrases of programs abroad, of “Oxford” and “Kenya,” of masters programs in Toronto, of doctorates in Chicago. I love the way our seminar class curves inward at the front, a row of desks licking the corners of the room as if we must get it all in, inclusively folding metal limbs in an arch around Dr. Pell as she strides in that well-worn place behind the podium.

On dull days, the days when the fi re in some secret cortex of my brain has died down and the pathways of
grey matter ring cold and dark to the wandering feet of my thoughts, I wonder if this is all I love, the sense of learning, the aesthetics of academia. If this turns out to be the case, if I have defrauded my professors throughout the years with a finely tuned act, I comfort myself that many a fraud can make it quite swimmingly in life. Should I have to fake a diploma too many, there’s always acting itself. Gwyneth Paltrow has made a career of pretending to be an academic, or at least, an excessively intelligent character of European citizenship. A good cardigan, a high ratio of books per room, a British accent, a professorial lead, and you’re set. No one would know she dropped out after freshman year.

Britta, a friend from “first year,” knew the Paltrow technique well. Crazy about fashion and astoundingly intelligent, she would institute what she called “smart days” on which she would pull every wise and witty garment out of her closet to clothe her person. She would complete the look with a pair of oddly incisive glasses. No prescription, of course.

I wonder about this. Perhaps I should buy a tie. Or a ponderous brooch of some sort. I scribble the word “authenticity” in the margin of my notebook and stare glumly. Overused. “Charade.” Much better. A fun
word. Disillusioned with myself, I give up and let the pen drop.

But then the book falls open. Rilke breathes poetry. Kierkegaard asks the question. Hemingway chooses a word. Woolf combs long, unsettling fingers dipped in a fierce beauty through the tangled strands of my mind. Thoughts are plaited into cords of meaning. The print of certain pages burns into our retinas. The turn of a phrase turns the path of lives. Characters walk off pages and push my assumptions around rudely. Philosophers pull up a chair by a fire and ask what the hell I think.

This is what makes me dance through the corridors of my mind. The discovery of doors that open onto other corridors that open onto other corridors that open onto a world or a universe that I have never before seen. We turn the knob in search of a reference and fi nd ourselves standing in Erasmus’ hallway, turning the corner of Shakespeare’s library, looking out Milton’s front window.

I’ve always resented the memorizers. You who loot the shelves of every fact and theory and carry it away with you to your own study, I wish my mental arms carried so much. I can’t remember my own mother’s birthday, or perhaps more significantly, the library due date of my fifteen research books. But I can stare out a window and take in the view. I can remember the odd conversation in Kant’s kitchen, the after-dinner gossip in Wilde’s drawing room.

And so, while I may fake a few multiple-choice scantrons to receive that diploma, I do so with a profound
sense of gratitude. When I take that diploma, I will take with me a self that has been sculpted by the privilege of perspective. This education that I am still climbing through has become a series of doors, a wealth of pathways. It’s a education that has left me a chronically compulsive type of person. I’ll go through life trying
doorknobs, rattling locks, peering through peepholes for that extra glimpse I could so easily miss.

It’s a view I’ll gladly fight a few dictionaries to enjoy.