DanielSonenberg.com

So the last finals have come and gone, the last papers have been collected, and now I'm left with a dwindling pile of ungraded artifacts, some the product of intense toil, and some dashed off in the eleventh hour, whenever that was. If this were the Harry Potter-verse, instead of just the regular old world, I imagine I could chant some incantation in order to hear the agonizing moans, the sweat and angst each fugue or paper or little chorale harmonization cost its maker. As it stands the papers are just flat and white with black lines and spots, they reveal little of their gestation and birth history until you shake them upside down to bleed them of their intellectual lava. Even still, some assignments don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, and when it's 130 concert reviews or 17 fugues or 10 ensemble compositions it's an absolute given that these earthbound representatives of so much abstract contemplation and creative exertion will not be given their fair berth beneath a caring instructor's gaze. Still I console myself by saying it's the process, and in actuality it is. I mean life is really so much more about the process than the finished product, no? (The finished product, in most cases, is good only for horror movies and medical schools). Even with freedom round the bend, though, the end of a semester is always bittersweet to me. Especially in the classes where some kind of vibe came into being, some kind of understanding between myself and the students who cared. That last day we all know that it's over, that this same combination of persons and subject matter will never come together under the same lights again, and the laughs or arguments or revelations we shared are already receding into historical tapestry. I always feel a sadness on these days, and I catch myself occasionally glancing wistfully at my classroom full of students too eager to bound out into the halls, on to other finals and then a well-earned holiday, nary a glance back. I really understand the philosophy behind last-day parties, but I generally can't manage time well enough to make room for them. So I just watch the class turn to dust, the room empty out, and then gather up my scattered belongings for the last time, knowing full well that in a few weeks, and then again in a few months, and then even in a few years, or perhaps a whole gaggle of years, I'll be right back in the same spot getting excited about the French augmented sixth chord or Thelonius Monk's love of dissonant seconds all over again. My students, the ones from today, the ones already fading from my grasp, will be out there in the world doing great and terrible and ambivalent things, getting older all the while (like me). I only hope I sent them there with something, but I suppose you never really know.