An Oracle

Of Fate and Adjuncting

Dear Republic,

We continue with our tales of failure.

-ROL

AN ORACLE

I hear that college students are busy interrogating gender and dismantling white supremacy, but the school where I teach is behind the times, so each semester I’m assigned Western Civilization or Introduction to Philosophy instead. Adjuncting is a miserable business but at least I’m transmitting timeless wisdom, like what happens when you disrespect magic instructions. God says, see that specific tree? Don’t even try it. The blind priest tells Oedipus, please my guy, stop with the questions. The soothsayer tells Julius Caesar, mark your calendar. Luckily for my syllabus, no one heeds the warnings. We love watching other people get it all wrong.

Advanced literary analysis in my classroom means working out what every jackass we encounter ought to have done instead. The problem with Caesar, for example, is that he didn’t heed Calphurnia’s warning, as one of my older students is eager to explain. “His wife dreams that he’s a statue running with blood,” says Peter. “She knows. She begs him. On her knees she says, do not go out. If Julius listens, he lives. But no, he has to be the big man. You see? William is telling us, listen to your wife, because a woman will know.”

I like Peter’s sentiments too much to remind him about Eve. In fact, it’s so reassuring to think that the right path is available upon request that my students are inclined to invent warnings that never happened. “Noah tried to tell them—repent, repent, the flood is coming!” announces Jessica, who may have spent time in church but is a little behind on her Genesis reading. I explain that the text does not report Noah’s being nearly so community-minded. Perhaps he was too busy with his construction project? My students don’t agree, and suspect I’ve got hold of the wrong Bible somehow. Their moral intuition is that you ought to get a fair shot to do the right thing, so if you don’t, no one has to feel bad about what happens next.

But according to the latest clever philosophers, no one could have ever done anything else. Embedded in our present circumstances and being unfortunately exactly who we are, we were never capable of making different choices. “It’s not fate,” I explain to my philosophy class. “It’s determinism.” Which, coincidentally, is also how I console myself for not having gotten a better job years ago.

My students politely tolerate the argument against free will and don’t believe a word of it. Later in the course, they are bemused by moral philosophy cliffhangers, and do their best to improve on them. Kant’s man in need of money—did he ever ask for that dishonest “loan,” or did his wife have a dream about the categorical imperative? As for the trolley, don’t leave us hanging—did it run over those hapless track workers, or not? My students are ready to supply whatever supernatural guidance may be missing. Adenna says, “My opinion? If I’m at the switch, God put me there for a reason. He will give me the strength to pull. I save five people, I am a hero! But I give the glory to God.”

As far as I can tell from teaching Dante’s Inferno, though, God actually has more fun if we make the wrong choices. What’s Hell for, if not to allow the Almighty an eternal I told you so? Maybe divine hints exist to be ignored, so that something more interesting will happen. Outside of books, we are eager to identify the right portents (having to do with one’s status as a Capricorn, perhaps, or the data on carbon emissions) and pay appropriate attention. One looks back on life, and catalogs the omens missed that produced the current catastrophe. When did Brutus look at me funny? When ought I to have pursued a different line of work?

Certainly there were signs I should have been doing things differently: poor online reviews, classes cancelled unexpectedly, low status, insufficient paychecks. But it’s hard, in life, to tell the reliable oracles from the false prophets, especially without a wife to help sort them out. Once I made a fatal choice or three, teaching became the thing I was already doing. Then, like a Dantean sinner replaying her sin, it felt impossible to stop. So feel free to read this essay with Aristotelian pity and fear. Of course you’re stuck grading papers, you can say in delighted horror. That’s what you get for going to grad school.

Miriam Fried’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Vita Poetica, Scoundrel Time, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review, Ambit, and The Baltimore Review, among others. Her essay “Losers Keepers,” published in The Rumpus, was selected as a Longreads Editors’ Pick.

Painting, “The Assassination of Caesar,” by Heinrich Friedrich Füger.