Did I ever tell you that I'm a determinist?

Hello there, my red, white, and blue friends (although not necessarily in that order, Morgane),

As many of you know, I am disillusioned with academia. As Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overpopulation, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Part of the reason that I was no longer happy was that I saw the futility of what I was producing with my life; I realized that the work I was straining myself to produce was, while occasionally intelligent and well-written, ABSOLUTELY POINTLESS. Expending my spirit writing fluff just to prove that I am "intelligent" to people about whom I care nothing finally disgusted me to the point that I had to flee - The University, America, Academia. Of course, I assumed that if I ran away to Eastern Europe, I would escape the prison of Academia...

So, this week I made a journey to Elblag, Poland, 17 hours by train north of Prague. It's a provincial town near Gdansk, on the Baltic Sea, 50 miles from Russia. As you know, Emily and I will begin working there in September. This was my little slice of NOWHERE. Certainly in Northern Poland, I would be able to live a quiet, only mildly pretentious life, trading scholars for cows, academic journals for equally cold ice, and the publish-or-perish system for post-communist era bureaucracy. However, when I arrived, I quickly realized that fate (a convenient name for a mind-bogglingly complex set of circumstances) had other plans for me. This "Regent College" is actually the largest private school in Poland, directly supervised by Gdansk University. It's kind of an experiment by two expatriate professors, and they've created this bizzare yet idyllic New England-style boarding school in the middle of an otherwise drab, communist-looking provincial Polish town. The school is a bit like Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Children, only much, much smaller (and the Polish kids' powers aren't nearly as cool).

It turns out that these two professors, one American and one Scottish, have big plans for me. Over beer and pizza, the Scottish guy, an immensely likeable man, admitted to me that they really, really want me to join their little conclave of elite hyper-powerful expatriate intellectuals. The three of us, he said, will eventually come to dominate all thought in Northern Poland, before expanding to Western Russia and the Baltic States. Apparently, they are attracted by the work I did in subliminal messaging back in '92, and have taken steps to secure my expatriation and emigration to Poland. And last but not least, between equally desperate pleas for me to commit "long-term" to their provincial Polish experiment, and for me to get my PhD in Linguistics at Gdansk University, they tempted me by saying that if I stick around, I would get to teach Latin and Greek.

So, here I am again, in the midst of academia. Perhaps this will be quite different than my experiences at a conservative Catholic university in the heartland of America, but somehow, I don't really think so. However, they make a tempting offer, and I shall have a lot to think about. Oh, you who sympathize with my plight, remember poor Aaron, who could not, no matter how he tried, remove pen from inkwell at the desk of inanity.

Forever chained to the card catalogue,

Aaron Rotsinger