DICK OSSEMAN
The taking of Persephone
The inauguration of this year’s, as of every year’s, pedagogical peregrination is a queer amalgam of the joy in reuniting with the friends whom you couldn’t bother to see over the summer, and the infinitely resigned disillusionment emanating from one’s cognizance of the ineluctability of Persephone’s standing sojourn. But, really, even this allusion, whither inconversant adults, rendered impotent by their rapid deterioration into senescence, may scoff as histrionic and jejune captures but a fraction of the disappointment presupposed, as Persephone is gone but one third of the year, and this begins mid-November. If only we had such fortune as her! For what was our transgression, our pomegranate seed, that we have incurred the indemnity of education pro bono, to be paid over thirteen years? So, benevolent despots, if you might condescend to grant every remittance, and bear every complaint, and cosset us at all expense, we would be ever so obliged, since, after all, it is clearly the students who schlepp about the grandest millstone.
But, rest assured, we shall hold up our end of the cross of our crucifixion, we shall attend classes, in absentia ever and anon for whatever reason we can conjure extemporaneously; if there, we shall, with a mien of either vague derision or unutterable ennui, desultorily allow your drivel to enter and depart as-the-crow-flies through our auricular egresses; we shall engage in vacuous confabs whenever the mood strikes; and if where the requisite knowledge pertaining to an assessment ought to repose within us is but a vacuum, we shall liberally dole out confabulations, tastefully tucked amidst circumlocution.
To those of my compatriots who may expostulate that in desperation for a rapprochement I have forfeited nearly all our righteous claims: Whereas I accede their disaffection to be only natural, I would entreat them to look to the prescient words of Silence Dogood, who I’m certain is looking up as us this very moment, dumbstruck in his adulation and humbled in his pride at being adduced in a document to actuate an epoch of grandest import: “it is not the best we could make, but the best they would accept.”
-W.K. Armin