My Thank-you for Your Kind Words
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I want to start by thanking everyone for their kind wishes. I had hoped that this day would have passed quietly and without notice. However, because social media is what it is, and my daughter wished to commemorate this day, that was not to be. I suppose that's good too. I also wish that I could say that the news of my retirement was greatly exaggerated, but it's not. I say this because the measure of my work has always been my appearances before a group of students with lectures prepared and something to profess and not by my books, articles and other publications.
I will no longer do that on a professional level.
However, I am still permitted to totter about the university hallways and grill random undergrads on Kant’s categorical imperative, Hegelian concepts of reality, or St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument (grad students get a pass from me because their lot, in my view, is grim and tenuous enough on the best of days without me adding to their misery). I will still be allowed to lecture as what might be considered, hopefully, an enthusiastic and gifted amateur. There are still universities around the world that want to hear from me.
The funny thing is that I now have time for my research, which means that I will never truly retire in the fullest sense of the term. I still have a publisher who is willing to publish my work. The archives and libraries are still open to me to go to and rummage through their wares. I still can type on a computer. So, I'll never truly retire. While I don't get to be a professor at a university anymore, I am permitted to be something even dearer to my heart, be a scholar in the word’s original sense, and have my studies seek their own avenues of new knowledge.
There is one further side benefit. I can go and stare at art whenever I damn well please because I don't have to attend committee meeting after committee meeting after committee meeting. This is not a knock on the colleagues in these committees. I suspect they desire to be there about as much as I do. I’m sure they will be fine without me.
From here on in, you may find me doing one of the following or haunting one of the following places:
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I will try and get in as a volunteer tour guide at the Gemäldegallerie in Berlin.
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Bothering the archivists at either the Bundesarchiv in Berlin or the National Archives at Kew (London).
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Getting Kaffee und Kuchen at the Konditorei G. Buchwald.
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Having a beer or Moppel-Poppel at the Trarbacher Klause.
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Taking in a play at the Berliner Ensemble.
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Taking in “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
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Enjoying the sights at the Milchhäuschen am Weißensee.
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Or, at my computer, banging out my next book.
It’s not all going to happen right away. The plan is to kick all this into gear starting in September 2022. I need a diversion then because it is the start of a cycle that has defined my life for the last 36 years. I will still be employed. However, I will spend the last year at MUN devoted to research.
This is what's left after the years and students have their way with you.
