I teach English--to me less an academic subject than the central nervous system in the body of all learning. We know only as much as we can say, and we know lastingly only as much as we can say with grace, imagination, sincerity, rhythm. There's a poem by Wallace Stevens about two climbers who stop, mid-hike, panting, to stare at the massive rock rising above them. Picture the summit of Monadnock all gray-scaled with fog. It's not a beautiful place by any means, but an inhospitable, bleak, lonely one. The last stanza paints that picture, but adds something more, too:

There was the cold wind and the sound

It made, away from the muck of the land

That they had left, heroic sound

Joyous and jubilant and sure.

There's a spine-tingling, spine-straightening comfort in the fact that here, just at the great height where we expect some six-winged revelation to appear to us, it doesn't--that for the moment just the current of air over an obstacle is enough, those vowels that spell out the mundane world in motion. If even the emptiest sound, rightly listened to, carries this kind of reassurance, joyous and jubilant and sure, how much more so might our articulate speech? The poem happens to be titled "How to Live. What to Do," and I've taken those orders as literally as I can.

That doesn't mean I don't love the muck of the land. Most people who wreck their eyes reading late into the night walk outside the next morning looking to touch things, climb trees, balance rocks, feed chickadees out of the palm of the hand. All these things help a person remember that he exists. Birds in particular fascinate me. They arrive in the vision before you have time to see them coming, and they're gone again before you can address them properly. The Venerable Bede, an eighth-century saint and the first English historian, compares the brevity of human life to a swallow whooshing into a long dining hall, flying over the heads of the lords and ladies at their supper, and out the window on the other side. There's something of that comparison in every bird-sighting, the same old words hanging on everybody's lips, over and over, like a couple of bread-crumbs: Please stay. I'd like to entangle my own life with that of a bird for a while, if not for good. One effort to do so has turned me into an active falconer. Falconry is the practice of prolonging one's own unrequited love to the torturous breaking point: in the end, the bird goes back to the wild, no longer needing you. Never tame, never truly yours, at most she tolerates your presence, with a glare. Among the more humbling disciplines, it's one I'd like to continue here at Dublin.

School has always given me butterflies; there's the sense that impromptu theatrics might be about to break out at any moment. A classroom, especially a small one, seems to me an ideal theater for the rehearsal and production of all kinds of dramas. Within it, everyone is simultaneously an actor and a member of the audience, teachers and students both. I like sloshing buckets of water over the head of whatever pour soul volunteers to read King Lear's lines in the thunderstorm, while others scream like banshees, trying to drown him out. I like stumbling around as the newly blinded Polyphemus, while Odysseus and his men cling to the undersides of the desks to avoid detection. I like listening to extemporaneous speeches, delivered from a rooftop in the style of Martin Luther King. But the fun is not in making a mess, or making noise; it lies in the essential dramatic act, this trying-on of other forms, other selves, other ways of moving and talking and writing. Language itself is the stage on which we play it out, this investigation without bounds: its two wings, windows on either side, stay open.

I've been at Dublin only a few weeks, but the place has gotten to me. The wind skis down through the hemlocks and the sugar maples like a mountaintop hero late for breakfast; Ray's already cooking up a storm for him in the kitchen; and out the back of the dining hall, the whole Monadnock valley patiently awaits the arrival of the migrating hawks. Up at the Observatory, auspices are being taken. There's talk of a hurricane, but also of planting an orchard, of new building projects. I've hiked up here not just to listen to it, but also to partake of it, get entangled in it. However well one knows how to live, what to do, there remains the living, the doing, the performing--in one's own costume, one's own voice.