Tuesday, January 14, 2014

It's Not You, Marcel, It's Me...

...but I think we need to see other people. No, no, dear, of course I'm not breaking up with you, it's just that I need...some...time.

So Buce to Marcel Proust, or perhaps to his shadow Marcel, hero of his 3,000-page doorstop, À la recherche du temps perdu.  Seems like only yesterday (actually, I guess it was last month) that I set out to  make the long journey through this which Edmund White calls the most respected of 20th Century novels.   I suspected what would happen, and it happened. As long as i had an hour or two or three a day, I was able to keep a rhythm, and even follow up with some of the original French.

But then school started and now here I am back in the classroom with the markedly un-Proustian agenda of bankruptcy and corporate finance.  And I can certify that Proust and the finance classroom just don't mix.  It's not the time: I'm not one to work 18 hours a day at anything, and I probably could find time for an hour, maybe even two, or three, a day to indulge my Belle Epoque enthusiasm.

I suppose you could say it's brain cells:  I've reached the age where 200,000 brain cells die every day and I just can't risk destroying too many of the survivors in a private enthusiasm. But it'd not just brain cells.  No; it is the utter discontinuity of tone, of manner, of sensibility that it takes to move from one to the other.  I woulds get the bends, and bends are not covered by my health plan.

I expect to be back in the spring, Lord willin.' And if the Lord is not willin'--if I die with a stack of Prousts on the night table--why then, you'll know that I was never bored, that I never ran out of stuff to read.

Now, exactly which things are there about financial  accounting that my students just must learn?

1 comment:

Ken Houghton said...

"Now, exactly which things are there about financial accounting that my students just must learn?"

They must learn that a madeleine, properly accounted for, may appear as an asset, a liability, and a contra-asset, but is always Excess Equity in the right hands.

Which are rarely those of the company whose books you are reviewing.