The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  Grace and Simone appeared back in the kitchen then, the latter now wearing a grey wool cardigan over the offending tank top. “Philip,” she asked as she opened the family fridge and pulled down her lunch, “are you still taking me to that dance recital tomorrow?”

  “Of course I am,” I replied, beginning to assemble my concoction despite the fact I was missing one of its chief ingredients. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, something bad has happened, right?”

  Grace and I looked at each other.

  “What’s going on?” Simone pressed.

  Grace and I looked at the floor.

  Simone then pulled her rhinestone-covered iPhone out of her cardigan’s pocket. “I got a text from Sarah last night,” she said, scrolling. “It reads, ‘My mom says your stepdad’s a real dickhead.’” She pushed the screen toward my face. “Do you want to read the rest of what it says?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Okay, you’re now late,” Grace said. “You have to go. Right now.”

  “Fine,” Simone sighed, giving a roll of her eyes. She grabbed her bookbag off the counter and threw on a coat from the front closet. “Okay, bye!” she yelled, and then was out the door.

  “You know,” Grace said, “she’s convinced you’re going to renege on taking her tomorrow.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I replied, dropping a celery stalk into the now completed Bloody Joseph and raising it to my lips. “And another thing: I finally remembered what we’re doing on Sunday.”

  “Oh, really?” She gave me a smirk that I could only interpret as an olive branch.

  “Yes. We’re having people in for brunch — Jane Elton included. And you want me to steer her in the direction of ‘Sally and the Kitchen Sink.’”

  Grace took a brief but longing glance over at the chaos of her writing desk. “Do you think she’d look at it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s not taking a lot of kids’ lit these days. But we’ll see.”

  “Anyway,” she said, turning back to me, “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about it right before you went on the show. I felt bad about that.”

  “Yeah, well. It was quite a thing to have on my mind when I was supposed to be routing Cheryl Sneed.”

  Grace made a face. “So it was my fault?”

  “I didn’t say tha —”

  “I’m the reason you said that horrible thing to her?”

  “Look, Grace, you need to underst —”

  “Let me remind you, Philip, that I wasn’t upset about the brunch. I was upset because your daughter scalded herself and you didn’t seem to care.”

  “Okay, I don’t have time for this. I have class later this mor­ning. I should be up in the office finishing my prep.”

  “Fine. I have to go to the Loblaws anyway. Naomi has a playdate early this afternoon, and I want to get back with the groceries in time.”

  Wonderful, I thought. What a wonderful day you have ahead of you.

  “Naomi, sweetie, let’s get your shoes on. We have to go.” She took the child’s near-empty cereal bowl, scraped its mushy remnants into the compost, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. She then turned to me. “Do you need anything from the store?”

  I gazed briefly at my bar fridge. “I need lemons,” I told her with not a small hint of desperation.

  Two hours later, I stood on Parliament Street waiting for the 65 bus to whisk me north to the Castle Frank subway station. There, in front of me, sat a Toronto Sun news box with my picture in the window.

  Oh Jesus, you have to be fucking kidding me.

  But no: there I was — my comb-over like a frond splayed across my skull, my red beard thick and untrimmed — taking up the tabloid’s entire front page. Alongside this mug shot ran a vertical headline that said:

  “Penetrating”

  Insights

  on

  ODS

  Oh, please! I thought. Did my heinous remarks against those executives really warrant a front-page blast? And since when do Toronto Sun readers care about philosophy anyway? I couldn’t bear to take in the subhead, let alone deposit my loonie and read the entire article. Does the Sun even run articles? Isn’t it all just scantily clad girls and salacious headlines?

  I turned away from the box just as the bus pulled up. As I boarded, I worried about the stares and judgments of my fellow commuters. Thankfully, they were few in number that late in the morning, and didn’t seem much interested in looking up from their phones.

  “Freedom exists,” I had said, back in September, in the opening lecture to this, my survey course on the Enlightenment, “because it serves the interests of power. To understand this is to understand everything — from Herodotus to Dick Cheney.” A ballsy opening salvo, for sure, but one I felt necessary to establish what I considered to be the nomos of the period in which I am an alleged expert. That lecture hall teemed with a large congress of young people — still tanned and tank-topped from their summer vacations — who may have possessed, as a result of cultural theory courses or Mel Gibson movies, an opposite view: that the entire trajectory of Western civilization placed “freedom” in opposition to “power.” It was my mission to disabuse them of this fallacy; an eight-month pollarding that would allow sturdier branches of intellectual curiosity to grow. I knew that some of these students would go on to become vocal critics of the Enlightenment; others would end up as Bay Street biz-knobs; still others would resign themselves to a life packing groceries at the Loblaws. But I liked to think that I nonetheless laid down an explanatory foundation — even a subconscious one — of the culture we were all saddled with. The kids knew coming in what to expect from a Philip Sharpe survey course: the readings would be lengthy and intense; writing assignments would come at them fortnightly, along with two major research papers and an exam at the end of each term; extensions would not be given under any circumstances. And yes, I had certain trammels about cellphones and tardiness, but I made it clear that, in exchange for these limitations on their personal freedoms, they would be allowed to engage in a different kind of freedom: the freedom to question me, to challenge each other, to debate the ideas captured in their readings. They were here to be scholars, to be thoughtful contributors in discussions during their group work and in the broader class. Indeed, the freedom to speak their minds was the nomos of this course, because it served the interests of my power, as their professor.

  I had been making great strides with this batch over the last two months. They had started out as a predictably costive crew during my lectures, and their early assignments were plagued by pleonasms and leaps in logic. Now, they could be counted on to volunteer answers to my Socratic queries; and their essays were sharper and more succinct, in no small part thanks to the efforts of my brainy, uncomplaining TA, Sebastian, an ABD (“All But the Dissertation”) fluent in four languages who earned his $8,000 a year poring over and improving these students’ sentences. What’s more, the kids were just beginning to grasp the chief tenet I wanted them to take away from this course — that the relationship between freedom and power was far more paradoxical than the current culture wars would have us believe. This relationship — while finding its origin in the ancient world (and how could my early lectures not pay passing nods to The Republic, The Nicomachean Ethics, and various Periclean bon mots?) — truly came to fruition during the Enlightenment. And far from being one homogenous groupwank about “individual freedom,” this epoch possessed codependent contradictions that helped shape the very core of Western identity and what we might still unironically refer to as civil society. Eloquent extrapolations on this earned me what I hoped to see across that sea of student bodies: nodding baseball caps, nodding ponytails, and, yes, nodding hijabs, their corresponding hand-clasped pens scribbling, scribbling.

  Which made it all the more difficult to walk into that lecture hall on Tuesday morning and discover an atmosphere o
f unmitigated tension — airborne and palpable. Sebastian came bounding up to me from the front row when I appeared through the double doors near the stage and took me aside. “Sir,” he said, almost sotto voce, “are you interested in cancelling class today?”

  “What for?” I asked.

  He sucked air through his clenched teeth. “People are sort of upset with you.” I looked beyond him and, sure enough, I was getting the stink-eye from several of my young charges.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll proceed.”

  Sebastian nodded in acquiescence. I have to say I liked the boy a lot. He was going to make a great professor one day, in the highly unlikely event he landed a job. But he still spoke to me in the way that all TAs did — as if I possessed a sack of gold coins that I would give him at the end of the year, if only he was worthy enough.

  As I moved to the lectern and took out my notes from my satchel, I could tell that two months of hard work had been undone. The class sat before me glaring, as silent as tombstones. It was like the first day all over again.

  I took a long, deep breath. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” I said, unsheepishly as I could, into the abyss. I could have said more to them; probably should have said more, facing head on what they had seen and read on Twitter and Facebook and in the Toronto-fucking-Sun. They could have asked me questions and shared their “feelings.” And we could have related what I had said on TV — that abominable blunder — to what we’d been reading and discussing all term. It was applicable, after all; and I was even a little impressed that my slip had caused such a shockwave through these tyro philosophers.

  But I didn’t. Chalk it up to cowardice, I suppose. Instead, I took up my copy of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals — a book I had first inhaled as a fifteen-year-old in Charlottetown, one that ripped through the fog of adolescence like a sunbeam — and held it aloft in a gesture that said, You’ve read this, yes? No acknowledgement, one way or the other. I pressed on, making a few biographical comments on Immanuel Kant and situating him into our somewhat jumbled chronology of the Enlightenment. Then I asked the most basic question one could to anybody who’d read the book. “Okay, people, in a nutshell, what is Kant’s categorical imperative? How does he define and explain it in the context of our reading?”

  Nothing. The girls merely scowled at their desks or examined their cuticles. The boys lay slumped in their seats as if poured there by a cement truck. A few of the faces threw tight little smiles my way, but they were full of unmistakable malice.

  No matter. I slogged on, working myself into a lather about Kant and his immeasurable contribution to both the Enlightenment and all of Western thought. I threaded a careful needle with our previous readings, explaining how Kant’s works had added a crucial shading to those of his contemporaries, how his introduction of deontology to the mix had crystallized so much of what the Age of Reason was trying to articulate about human nature. “It’s clear to even a casual reader what the categorical imperative means to the study of ethics,” I said, “but what about reason itself? What does the categorical imperative contribute to our notions of the rational?” Dead silence. Not even the gentle susurrus that often preceded class participation. I plugged on, detailing the difference between Kant’s categorical imperative and his hypothetical imperative. “What bearing does this distinction have on what we discussed before — about, say, the courts or even industrial relations?” Nothing. “Okay, what does it say about one-on-one interactions between people? How we treat each other?” Nothing again. Okay, kids, I thought, how does it relate to what I said about those corporate assholes on television yesterday that’s put this bowling pin up your asses? But I bit my tongue.

  As we approached the end of our eighty minutes together, Sebastian and I unveiled their next fortnightly writing assignment. This was another element that set my course apart, and, to be honest, contributed most to the libellous pouting that took place about me on ratemyprofessors.com. I did not believe in handholding or steering students toward certain thesis statements. Doing so ran counter to what I considered to be the true spirit of scholarship. Sebastian worked the laptop to make their essay assignment appear on the screen behind me. It was, in total, a lengthy quote from the second section of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, followed by the word “discuss.”

  I read the quote aloud, explained a few things in it, then asked if anyone had any questions. Their silence lingered for a moment. But then one young man, wearing his baseball cap backward, raised a beefy arm off his desk.

  “Yes?” I asked, pointing at him, gratitude flooding me like a fever.

  “What does Kant mean by ‘rational being’?” he smirked. “What would he consider to be an irrational being? Like — a woman?”

  “Shut up!” the pretty young lady sitting next to him, obviously his girlfriend, screamed. She didn’t so much punch his shoulder as shove it angrily with her fist. Two other girls, less pretty, sitting in the row in front of him, twisted around in their seats. “Asshole!” “You’re such a prick!”

  Clearly some residual argument from before I entered the room. Clearly. As the commotion died down, I waggled my furry face at them, a gesticulation that said: What the fuck are you people on about? But no explanation came.

  “That is all,” I snarled, gathering up my notes, and fled from the lectern.

  Sebastian and I spoke little as we made our way through University College and up its ornate staircase that led to my office, where we needed to discuss Thursday’s group topics. I unlocked my office door — decorated with black-and-white images of Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, and Descartes, as well as a five-by-twenty plank of PEI driftwood with the phrase SAPERE AUDE (“dare to be wise”) embossed on it — and we entered my large, book-choked lair. Too many books, in fact. The tsundoku spilled out of overstuffed shelves and across the floor and onto the chairs. (Grace had said that if we bought a small cottage in the Kawarthas — something she’d been hankering for us to do for a while now — we would have extra wall space for books, since we didn’t seem to have a square inch left at 4 Metcalfe Street or here.) Sebastian moved some out of the way so he could sit, and I took my place behind the desk, turning on my green-shaded banker’s lamp.

  I glanced at my desk phone. The red message light was flashing. I never got messages on this phone. I raised a finger at Sebastian in a give-me-a-moment gesture and picked up the receiver, trying to remember how the fuck I accessed voicemail on this thing. I figured it out, and discovered I had seven messages waiting for me. The first was from Roberta Rosenbaum, a reporter with the Globe and Mail whom I dated briefly in the late ’90s when I first began freelancing for them, and with whom I was still friendly. “Oh, hey, Philip, it’s Roberta R.,” she sang into the receiver. “I bet you can guess why I’m calling. Just hoping you could give me a statement abou —” DELETE. The others were from media outlets as well: reporters from the National Post, the Toronto Sun, two AM talk radio stations, the Toronto Star, and, bringing up the rear, the CBC. I deleted each without listening all the way to the end.

  Hanging up, I looked at Sebastian. “Reporters,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Did you want me to …” and he motioned to the door.

  “No, no. Stay. We have work to do.”

  So we did our work, going over the group topics with stunted, false alacrity. Like me, Sebastian had Kant’s text practically memorized, and I marvelled again at how seasoned he seemed for someone not yet thirty. He took the lead in figuring out which passages to focus on and the discussion prompts we’d give the students. I agreed with each of his choices, but with a kind of torpid distraction. When he noticed this he stopped and looked at me.

  “Sir …”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you, do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?”

  I said nothing.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” he went on. “But ar
e you going to make a statement about …” and he nodded toward my phone.

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. Then I looked at him. “What do you think I should do?”

  He made that lips-pulled-from-clenched-teeth face again, his throat a brief spasm of dismay. “I think you need to say something. Even if it’s a blanket apology to Sneed so we can all move on. That would be better than nothing.”

  I gave a weak chortle. “My wife said the same thing this morning. I … I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Look,” he said, “I know there are lots of people in this department who hate your guts, who’d love to see you eat a big mouthful of crow over this. But there are also plenty of us who respect you deeply, who know that what you do makes an incredible contribution to the political discourse in this country. And we want to see you eat crow over this — because we respect you.”

  “You know, Sebastian,” I said, finding his Gefolgschaft touching, “you really are wise beyond your years.”

  He tried to smile. “Sapere aude.”

  “Sapere aude,” I replied. “Okay, we can wrap up here. I think we’re in good shape for Thursday.”

  “Sir …”

  “Look, everything will be all right,” I told him. “Don’t worry, okay. I’ll see you Thursday.”

  “Okay.”

  When he was gone, I wheeled over to my computer to check email, and discovered I had an additional forty-one notifications from Facebook waiting for me. I gaped at the list of unfamiliar names. Oh, people — get a life! I began batch-deleting them when I spotted another message sitting among the rabble. It was from U of T’s dean of Arts and Sciences. I opened it and read: