love is ludicrous, it is just as ludicrous whether I find a princess or a servant girl,” he says.2 In my case, one might paraphrase: a crush is just as ludicrous whether he be a musician or a philosopher.
All of this only served to make me nervous, now that I was in the same room with them, now that they were taking song requests, from me (and the pretty young things in their tall shoes).
We sat on stools in the back as they played, and I loosened up. They were funny, the guys in the band. Normal guys, not rock stars—the kind of guys I might have hung out with in college, I thought. College—longer ago for me than for them. They bantered from the stage, and their banter had a relaxing effect on me, my stress releasing with each laugh.
They finished the sound check, though, and I remembered that I was still a thirty-year-old introverted philosopher in Birkenstocks. Thirty. So young in the grand scheme of years, yet perhaps too old to be a fangirl, I realized belatedly.
We milled about. The band guys introduced themselves, asked how I came to listen to their music. I softened as I told them about seeing them open for the Indigo Girls in Raleigh a few years ago. We talked about Amy Ray. They expressed confusion about why I was in Minneapolis when I am living in Durham, and I offered a suitably vague answer. They told a story about the time they played at Motorco, a venue near me in Durham, and I felt retroactive sadness that I missed it.
I sat on a stool, and one of the guitarists, Scott, sat down next to me. Scott, I had decided, is the cutest one.
He introduced himself, and we made conversation the way you would if you met someone somewhere ordinary, not at a private party before his band’s show in a tiny venue in the Midwest, not as a fangirl and a guitarist. I felt better, talking to him. I felt glad that I came, though now I was focused on how easily I lost track of what he was saying because of the light in his dark eyes, looking at me. He glanced around, apologized, said he just wanted to be sure there wasn’t something else he should be doing—it’s the first time they’ve done one of these things.
I took him to mean he wasn’t sure it was okay that he was talking only to me, and I smiled my shy smile again. He asked me why I was in Minnesota, and this time I didn’t give the vague answer. I blame his eyes for magicking the truth out of me. Eye contact, the source of so much accidental truth telling.
“I’m doing research at the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College,” I told him. “It’s like philosophy camp for grown-ups.”
Away flew any chance I had of pulling off the Cool Girl act.
He laughed, this delightful laugh. “That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard . . . I love it.” He smiled, his eyes dropping for a moment as his body moved with laughter. And then he said this: “I studied philosophy in college.”
DANGER. Cute musician also likes philosophy. No good can come of this.
“But I’ve never read any Kierkegaard. What’s his thing?”
I am sorry to say I gave a terrible introduction to Kierkegaard—I rambled about Abraham, about the Knight of Faith, which isn’t even my favorite part of Kierkegaard’s work. What a missed opportunity. If I were a true Kierkegaardian Flirt I would have drawn on all of my knowledge of Works of Love and Stages on Life’s Way to discuss passion, preference, all the subtle nuances of self-deception and seduction in the works I’ve studied for nearly a decade now. Alas, the moment passed. I resolve to do better, next time.
Scott told one of the other guys the real reason I was in Minnesota, completely blowing my cover. I was back in my normal role as aging nerd, as the Smart Girl. And it was okay. A decade studying philosophy has taught me that such resistance to my deeper self is futile. Nights like this, when I fought it, are more and more rare. I’ve changed; I am no longer twenty-two, thank God.
The band prepared to leave for dinner. I would see them again later, for the show, though we’d be separated then by lights and a crowd. “The crowd is untruth,” I think, according to Kierkegaard. But the laughter in Scott’s eyes was true.
We took a picture, we said goodbye.
Scott hugged me. Those smiling eyes made contact with mine once more, and it seemed somehow that being the Smart Girl is not half bad.
Kierkegaard would have a field day with me, I’m sure.
When I began college at nineteen I had never read a single page of philosophical writing. I would have struggled to tell you what philosophy actually was if you had asked me. As a high school student I had always assumed I was going to study English in college, and be a writer. I also assumed that I would spend my life waiting tables.
Philosophy drew me in over time. One might think that the obsession with big ideas that consumed me in college was just a phase, abandoned as soon I found a slightly more realistic career path. Philosophy, after all, is the only major that gets made fun of more than English when it comes to potential for success. “Would you like fries with that?” people asked me, when I changed my major.
Yes, I would, thank you very much. Pass the ketchup.
Everything I ever liked or was good at was something that would mean struggling to support myself, and in college I worried about my future far more than was good for me. I lived in my head most of the time. I remember sitting in one of the roomy armchairs in the common room of my all women’s dormitory at Hope College a week or two into the semester, the Norton Anthology of Western World Literature in my lap, reading The Iliad, pleased to be in a 200-level literature class with mostly sophomores during my first semester, but feeling like I may have gotten in over my head. Lindsey, who lived across the hall from me, walked in and paused outside her door.
“Meghan, you read all the time,” she said. I looked up, puzzled. Wasn’t that what college was for? I shrugged and went back to reading at a snail’s pace, hoping at some point things would start to click in my head. The literary world of the ancient Greeks fascinated me more than the conversations I overheard in the common room about boys or weekend parties (which usually drove me back into my tiny cinder block room to work). With time I became more comfortable with my ability to interpret the works I was studying; I did not understand fashion or dating, but I understood books. It helped when I got an A on my first college paper, too. I wish I could re-read that paper now, but it is lost to a world in which I still used floppy disks—bright purple ones, purchased at the college bookstore, and transported from one computer lab to the next.
Though my grades were good, I remained quiet in classes. I spent Saturdays at the library, and evenings reading in coffee shops with the studious friends I slowly unearthed. I doubted my own voice, and rarely expressed my opinions. I was not sure what my opinions were half the time. Then, toward the end of my first year of college, my advisor suggested that I take a philosophy course the following fall. It would be wise in case I ever decided to go to graduate school, she said, and besides that she thought I might enjoy it.
I laughed at the suggestion of graduate school. The thought had never even crossed my mind. I was part of the first generation in my family to attend a four-year college, and just getting this far seemed like an awful lot of education to me (and my parents). I had no idea why people went to graduate school in the first place, unless it was to become a medical doctor or a lawyer. As the sort of well-behaved young woman who takes her professors’ advice, however, I registered for Intro to Philosophy.
It was an eight-week, two-credit course that changed everything. “The Body” was the focus of the class, and we read both ancient and contemporary texts. Once a week we were required to write a one-page response paper about anything that struck us in the reading
