It Will Come to Me Read Online Free PDF

metaphysicians and Chaucer scholars. All of them had come from a diaspora of small dark offices in departmental rabbit warrens, where secretaries were wedged into spaces between filing cabinets, junior faculty banished to carrels in the basement of the library, graduate teaching assistants forced to conduct student conferences in the halls. The space and light and palatial proportions of the new building were almost too much for them. They wandered blinking into the great ground-floor lobby with its marble floors and mosaic murals and made their dazed way through wide, gracious hallways to their newhigh-ceilinged offices, all of them carpeted in smart beige-and-black tweed and fitted with mahogany desks and commodious built-in bookshelves. Each had its own upholstered reading chair and Swedish-designed reading lamp. A few had fireplaces.
    Even now, the building smelled faintly of new plaster and paint. As Ben walked along the hall from the elevator to his office he passed a display of photographs of the university's first four graduating classes, groups of seven and twenty and thirty-five and fifty, standing in black frock coats and ankle-length white dresses in front of the lone brick building that was the Lola Dees Institute in those days, surrounded on all sides by tuffed prairie. Peering into these pictures, examining the stern young faces preserved under glare-free glass, Ben found it impossible not to feel a little thrilled at how far the university had come, and how far he had come as well. He was probably a fathead, he admitted to himself, to feel this way; his colleagues would scoff if they knew. Their attitude toward the new home the university had provided them had advanced very quickly from gratitude to skepticism, and in some cases from skepticism to resentment. The grumbling in the halls had started before Thanksgiving: How was it that all the humanities departments—including political science and sociology and anthropology, which for reasons no one could remember had long been members of the division—were expected to occupy a single building when physics and chemistry and engineering each had their own? Hadn't they been relegated to a golden ghetto? Wasn't there a marginalizing impulse at work here, hiding behind the show of largesse? It was undeniable that the results of throwing them all in together had been mixed. Old enmities had been exacerbated by new proximities. Somebody was probably making notes for a study even now.
    Ben's office—a chair's office—was half again the size of his colleagues’ and equipped with a mini-fridge stocked with bottles of mineral water and a modular leather couch and a Brobdingnagian glass coffee table mounted on a pitted concrete pillar. One wall was all but taken up with a multipaned, floor-to-ceiling window looking down over a park of live oaks run through with brick walkways. Ben tended to keep his distance from the window: its size and clarity frightened him. He never felt quite comfortable in the office, never quite unobserved. He'd found that he was unable to do his own writing in this bright room; since the move to the humanities building he'd been working on his altruism manuscript at home in the mornings and coming into the office in the afternoons. He found it difficult to read here as well. The light was excellent and the armchair quite comfortable, but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to fling his leg over its armrest. He felt obliged to sit stiffly upright.
    This morning, the first day of classes, he was sitting in that armchair inching his way through an article entitled “Hard and Soft Duties” in
Acta Ethica Scandinaviensis.
After twenty minutes he flung the journal aside and moved to his desk to sort through the conference fliers and lecture announcements and publishers’ catalogs he'd found in his mailbox. Checking his e-mail, he found a communication from his editor at Priggers Learning, reminding him that the third edition of
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