Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims

Author:Bennett Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

The fact that a man has decided to read the Phenomenology proves that he loves Philosophy.

—Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

That night the reader couldn’t read. His application for the Fellowship was due tomorrow at midnight, and he still hadn’t written his proposal letter. He’d gone to the library to work, choosing his usual carrel on the top-floor stacks and opening his laptop to the blank document. Since arriving he hadn’t seen another soul, and it had been so long since even he had stirred that the track lights above the bookshelves—all motion-activated—had clicked off one by one. The aisles spread out before him in paths of darkness. Through the window beside him—a tall pane embrasured into the brick, narrow as an arrow-slit—he commanded a view of the campus parking lot. It was December, deadline season, the trees were bare and the air was gray, and though no snow was falling tonight, yesterday’s lines of white were still visible across the lot, making faint minus signs of the concrete parking chocks. The library was quiet and the world was calm. Six stories below, miniature students in bright parkas headed to their parked cars, evening seminars, bars. Some were probably his own students, the freshmen forced to take his section of Introduction to Philosophy: it was the same adjunct class he had been teaching for years, granted to graduate students for a meager living stipend, usually enough to cover the reader’s rent and, in alternating weeks, either books then food or food then books. He had taught his last class today, held his last office hours, and his students had all turned in their final essays, which were waiting in his backpack for him to grade. Now they were free. For the rest of the break he would have the building—the books—to himself. He sipped black coffee from his Thermos. Dear reader, the reader deleted. To the members of the Fellowship committee, the reader deleted. Everything depended on the first sentence, he knew. The Fellowship was selective, and his reader or readers would be looking for any reason to reject him. At his first mistake they would stop. It was their job to reject, they were basically being paid to hate every applicant except one. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine them. The way that criminal profilers must cast themselves into the thoughts of the serial killers they track, he attempted to project himself into his rejector. How would a mind that isn’t mine read this, he always asked himself when writing. How would this read to someone who isn’t me, who doesn’t know me? This is a good sentence, he sometimes caught himself thinking, but then, when he reread it with this other reader in mind—with this other reader’s mind—he would think, This is a terrible sentence, and delete it. The Fellowship committee usually included former Fellows, one from each field, so the reader’s reader would probably be one of his philosophical predecessors.

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