someone hailed me as i sat reading at the bus stop outside the library today. i almost couldn't recognise daniel heins, with his dark glasses and hair cut shorter, but he had been in my spenser class and i had dinner with him and his wife two semesters ago, and i leapt up and hugged him. daniel's wife is taiwanese, and he speaks some chinese and has been to singapore before. he also is a nohrnberg fan and has part shares in the nohrnberg chair. isn't that a random collection of facts to put together to introduce someone? daniel asked what i had been up to, and whether i had turned in a big paper to nohrnberg recently. i said that must be the thesis nohrnberg was talking about, and it was on riddles. daniel turns out to be writing on samson's riddle in milton, and thought that the riddle asks "what does woman want?" and that women and love are things milton never understood.

the conversation gets around to what i'm doing after graduation. go home, and then apply to grad school - i have about 5 months to work on applications. 5 months, or plenty more time. you're still young, he says, how old are you anyway? twenty-three, i told him. i thought that might be rather older than he expected i was, but he repeated, that's very young. (daniel is 39) where were you thinking of applying to? here, i hope, so that i can study with nohrnberg, of course. daniel admires nohrnberg tremendously and has taken 3 classes with him already, so this isn't an outsider asking - how can you want to study with any one person so much, how do you know he's *the* professor for you. which makes me feel a little hurt, to think that anyone who's already had a great deal of nohrnberg should even need to ask me this. besides, wherever you are, you could still stay in touch with nohrnberg. this too is something that i know, that nohrnberg is my mentor for life, but it won't be the same, not studying with him directly, seeing him all the time. i think i always feel vaguely injured or misunderstood, and probably only bob reeder really understands the relationship between nohrnberg and myself, which i felt daniel - or anyone else - doesn't. i also wonder if my relationship with nohrnberg is slightly different from other people's because most of the students who become close to him are graduate students, and therefore a lot older than me when they come to him. this works in opposite ways, i think. my relationship to him is, on the one hand, is less formal, because it isn't as an adult to another adult, but a child to an adult, so that i could say perfectly unintelligent things to him and burst into tears in his office and be as petulant or warm or honest as i like, and on the other hand, grad students think of their professors as colleagues and professionals, and additionally they think they're pretty darn smart too, so that they don't allow themselves to act like they are gaga over a professor, but as an undergraduate, and someone much younger, awe and idolisation has always been a big part of my attitude towards nohrnberg.

when i said this to daniel, he said to me, i think your love for nohrnberg is a good thing. love, he said, in a platonic sense. of course, i nodded, surprised. he explains that he hadn't meant platonic in the sense of non-sexual love, but platonic in the pursuit of knowledge. having a passion for knowledge, and to see knowledge embodied in someone so much older and wiser and loving them for it. i think that is true but i also wonder if that's not too - leda and the swan - wearing his knowledge with his power - and i want to think it's not merely that. daniel says that rousseau, as a young man, used to go wild over a new author and would read every single thing that author wrote. and then one day he would get too smart for the author, and then move on. but the knowledge that we outgrow authors never stopped him from the process of falling in love at the start. rousseau thought it was counter-intuitive to resist it. people need that passionate love for learning, whether it's bound up with a person or not, daniel says. we also talked about "preceptors", as i saw dickinson called higginson in her letters. it's a coincidence that a while ago i had put up what frye said about every young literary scholar needing a spiritual precept amongst the poets. for frye, it was blake, for nohrnberg, daniel thinks, it's joyce. nohrnberg had read ulysses before he ever encountered spenser, he told me. i admitted timidly that i hadn't read any joyce. daniel said that anyone interested in riddling had to read joyce, and that i should take this up directly. daniel goes to a weekly group reading of finnegan's wake, i think. i forgot to ask if he still did. i promised i would, over the next year, although in truth i am always intimidated when i think of this. who is it for you? oh, i don't know. i said. nohrnberg? but even then i knew that wasn't the right answer. it might be frye, more than nohrnberg, and i wasn't going to admit that. but i really think it is someone else.

daniel decides that he would go back to work on his renaissance paper. i am hoping i'll get a chance to have dinner with him and his wife before i leave.