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thrilled by what they took to be the eminence of that position; as it was, they looked upon this “ honor ” as something like divine compensation for the fate that had befallen their daughter. Their letters were addressed, without irony, to “ Professor Nathan Zuckerman ” ; I ’ m sure many of them, containing no more than a line or two about the weather in New Jersey, were mailed solely for the sake of addressing them.
    I was pleased myself, though not so awestruck. In fact, the example of my own tireless and re solute parents had so instilled in me the habits that make for success that I had hardly any understanding at all of failure. Why did people fail? In college, 1 had looked with awe upon those fellows who came to class un prepared for examinations and who did not submit their assignments on time. Now why should they want to do it that way, I wondered. Why would anyone prefer the ignobility of defeat to the genuine pleasures of achievement? Especially as the latter was so easy to effectuate: all you had to be was attentive, methodical, thorough, punctual, and persevering; all you had to be was orderly, patient, self-disciplined, undiscourageable, and industrious—and, of course, intelligent. And that was it. What could be simpler?
    What confidence I had in those days! What willpower and energy! And what a devourer of schedules and routines! I rose every weekday at six forty-five to don an old knit swimsuit and do thirty minutes of pushups, sit-ups, deep knee bends, and half a dozen other exercises illustrated in a physical-fitness guide that I had owned since adolescence and which still served its purpose; of World War Two vintage, it was tided How To Be Tough as a Marine. By eight I would have bicycled the mile to my office overlooking the Midway. There I would make a quick review of the day ’ s lesson in the composition syllabus, which was divided into sections, each illustrating one of a variety of rhetorical techniques; the selections were brief—the better to scrutinize meticulously—and drawn mos tly from the work of Olympians: Aristo tl e, Hobbes, Mill, Gibbon, Pater, Shaw, Swift, Sir Thomas Browne, etc. My three classes of freshman composition each met for one hour, five days a week. I began at eight thirty and finished at eleven thirty, three consecutive hours of hearing more or less the same student discussion and offering more or less the same observations myself—and yet never with any real flagging of enthusiasm. Much of my pleasure, in fact, derived from trying to make each hour appear to be the first of the day. Also there was a young man ’ s satisfaction in authority, especially as that authority did no t require that I wear any badge other than my intelligence, my industriousness, a tie, and a jacket. Then of course I enjoyed, as I previously had as a student, the courtesy and good-humored seriousness of the pedagogical exchange, nearly as much as I enjoyed the sound of the word “ pedagogical. ” It was not uncommon at the university for faculty and students eventually to call one another by their given names, at least outside the classroom. I myself never considered this a possibility, however, any more than my father could have imagined being familiar in their offices with the businessmen who had hired him to keep their books; like him, I preferred to be thought somewhat stiff, rather than introduce considerations extraneous to the job to be done, and which might tempt either party to the transaction to hold himself less accountable than was “ proper. ” Especially for one so close to his students in age, there was a danger in trying to appear to be “ a good guy ” or “ one of the boys ” —as of course there was equally the danger of assuming an attitude of superiority that was not only in excess of my credentials, but distasteful in itself.
    That I should have to be alert to every fine point of conduct may seem to suggest that I was unnatural in my role, when actually it