The Best of Pickering

Occupational Hazard

Occupational Hazard like the indiscretions of youth, some ailments are too boring to be bandied about in medical journals. While a thousand scalpels would leap from operating rooms to preserve the honor of cholera morbus , hardly a lancet would be raised in defense of tennis elbow or housewife ’s knee. Yet if such ailments do not inspire articles too profound for seriousness, a survey of academics from Maine to California would reveal that occupational hazards spare no named chair. In the paneled halls of ivy lurks pomposity. Rarely fatal, the virus usually leads to a comfortable mental state in which the sufferer becomes inaccessible to thought. What the disease lacks in virulence, however, it makes up for in epidemic proportions. Even the brightest, blue-eyed, ‹t young instructor fresh from an exhilarating jog through graduate school eventually slows, swells, and sickens . No antidote has been found for the corrupting effects of being treated by undergraduates as one of the wise men of the ancient world. Slowly the belief that one is Delphic gets under the skin and becomes incurable. But if medical science has found no vaccine for those sensations so warm to the ego, it has at least marked the stages of the disease’s progress. Soon after his ‹rst book meets with friendly critical nods, the young assistant professor becomes susceptible. Giving the lie to the old adage that clothes make the man, the sufferer strides into pomposity’s deceptive sartorial stage. Paunching slightly with con‹dence, he wraps himself in a tattered afghan in the winter and lets his toes dangle through the slits of Rhodean sandals in the summer. When reversed his paisley tie delivers a full-‹sted message, matched in its rough whimsicality only by the lavender shorts he wears to the president’s tea party. To the outsider this would seem a young man on the way out. But to the cognoscenti, this is clearly a man on the way up. They know that it is only a short step from afghan to Brooks Brothers. The paisley will be weeded out and Bronzini and Sulka will blossom in its place. The sandals will languish in the closet while those sweet harbingers of spring
151 Whitehouse and Hardy wingtips will escort a new associate professor to that tenured land where scotch and water purl against ice cubes like the Afton ›owing gently to the sea. Not long afterwards, our subject becomes “Guggenheimed” and ›ies away for a year in the British Library. A penchant for Gauloises and Harvey ’s amontillado and the appearance, much anticipated, of the book mark the disease’s inexorable progress. After the return from Bloomsbury, Vanity Fair prints of willowy John Whistler and languid Lord Leighton decorate the sufferer’s of‹ce walls while the poster celebrating the annual rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, curls in the wastecan. In the classroom a great vowel shift occurs as our not-so-young young man sounds like he lost his youth on the playing ‹elds of Eton or under the shadow of King’s College Chapel. On the title page of the book, L. Stafford Brown rises like the phoenix from the ashes of Leroy Brown, Jr. Alas, university life is imperfect. Unlike the happy bovine, the graying academic cannot forever graze in green pastures blissfully ruminating over the cud of learning long digested. Before our sufferer answers the great cattle call from above and assumes the mantle of a named chair, he becomes aware of his illness. While perusing the shelves of the bookstore and pondering a list of books to be read during summer vacation, he hears a student confuse him with Balaam’s inelegant long-eared beast of burden. At a colleague’s Christmas party, he harangues the pert helpmate of a junior member of the department with learned jocularity. Certain he had left her in the living room like Saul on the road to Damascus blinded by light, he returns from the Necessary House in time to hear her compare him to that befeathered creature whose cackling saved Rome from the Gauls. Awareness sweeps down upon him and he vows to take a cure. Unfortunately diagnosis is easier than treatment. Several remedies are available; and although each may cause a temporary remission, none can completely eradicate the disease. First our sufferer grows long sideburns and begins frequenting the society of the young and ignorant. With enthusiastic joie de vivre, he puts off the old and selects a new wife...