I am a New Yorker and I love New York City and I do believe that it is not like any other place. Nonetheless, sometimes one has to drag one’s love into the rational abstractions of logic. This is the way I speak about India also. I would not remain a teacher of the humanities if I did not believe that, at the New York end, standing metonymically for the dispensing end as such, the teacher can try to rearrange desires noncoercively through an attempt to develop in the student a habit of literate reading, suspending oneself into the text of the other, for which the first condition and effect is a suspension of conviction that I am necessarily better, I am necessarily indispensable, I am necessarily the one to right wrongs, I am necessarily the end product for which history happens, and that New York is necessarily the capital of the world leading to the United States as the new empire. It is not a loss of will especially since it is supplemented in its stand by its political calculus where the possibility of being a helper abounds in today’s triumphalist society.

A training in literate reading is a training in how to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. Although literature cannot speak, this species of patient reading, miming an effort to make the text respond, as it were, is a training not only in accessing the other so well that probable action can be prefigured but striving for a response from the distant other without guarantees. This is the reason I am speaking like this. It is not because I want to spin difficult prose, but because I am actually talking about what my undergraduate students do when they go out into the world, either toward Silicon Valley intellectual property or toward human rights, most of them into the corporate world and certainly toward international civil society. I have no moral position against grading or writing recommendation letters, but if you are attempting to train in literate reading, the results are not directly ascertainable by the teaching subject and perhaps not the taught subject either. In my experience, the proof comes in unexpected ways from the other side, but the absence of such proof does not necessarily mean nothing has been learned. This is why I say no guarantees.