His sports science students lack a sense of the eschaton, of the end times, W. says. They lack any sense of millenarian eschatology. How can he make them understand that there is no hope?
His students are too full of health to despair, W. says. They exercise too much, jogging into the seminar room in their sports kits, with towels round their necks.
He misses the old days, W. says, before his college closed the humanities, when his philosophy students had to be forcibly restrained from throwing themselves from lecture hall windows. He misses the lamentations he used to hear in his tutorials, and the student keening that used to resound down the corridors of his department.
Lars Iyer's Blog 