Vignettes

Professor W.'s pronunciation is at once lavish and sharp, a gravel-thick purr of deep, full-mouthed sounds ("shunamite traditions") and clacking consonants ("cross-cultural aesthetics"). She backtracks infrequently and she does it only to peel back the given layer of description and enrich it with another, adding appositives that build and never disturb. She speaks with an extraordinary aural momentum -- words move at a pace so steady that a pause becomes devastating, the listener rapt at attention in the lacuna between her full-mouthed sh and the next clatter of thought.

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Professor E.W. delights in art. Someone once told me, "joy delights in joy," and this is what he does--he finds the joy in the brushstroke, the joy in the wonder held in the physical and temporal and emotional distance between artist and object and beholder, and he shares it, unabashedly, with a slight, toothy smile, his right eye wandering behind his glasses, boyish, his hair mussed and his brown velour sportcoat and brown corduroy pants just on the other side of matching.

He is something of a black sheep in the society crowd of the department. The monolithic, German-bellied creator of Modernism and the dapper young American ex-lawyer photography scholar engage students with their awesome stature, with the impression that they are the fundamental pillars of their disciplines, imbued with wit and armed with wardrobes of equal consequence. Meanwhile E.W. finds his way by meandering through the English language, taking his time to weave through the customary trans-linguistic snags, stumbling over idioms and holding fast to familiar expressions, furrowing his brow in deep search of the next words. But with his patience and sensitivity, he often finds himself in the clear, and in those airy moments he talks joyfully, articulating with a rich scholarly vocabulary made richer by the delight in his voice, and the smile that graces the end of each sentence.