But Sebastian did not make the game the next day, or the week after, and soon his term and schedule started to fill up, as he fell into some kind of gentle fame — a genuine living writer, extant from the time when people grew up reading books and socialized with each other in the flesh. The irony was that Sebastian had not written much in years, his intellectual ambitions being almost entirely satisfied by his careful reading of several aphorisms of Epicurius, the words attaining ever more grace now that he had students to quote them to. The other great satisfier were late night reruns of American teen shows; he was surprised how much more easily he welled up at My So Called Life than at Shakespeare or at Bach; those series went straight to the emotional jugular for him.

He had arrived at a time of life when his answer to most of the questions du jour was ‘Well, I won’t be around to see it.’ He had had glory days and he didn’t mind reflecting on them as the procession of staid, well-funded events rolled past…

What didn’t fire him up were the rounds of literary events that made up his academic calendar: Germanist drinks, best young writers, Samuel Beckett prize, Poetry by Candlelight, Scrawl, Scribble, Urge and Slop or whatever the various undergraduate magazines were called. Looking round the audience at such events was a sobering sight; the white hairs on the wooden pews, the smell of decay; the average Irish pub was a school disco in comparison. At least at a sports game there wasn’t the chance of someone dropping dead during proceedings, a sporadic but undeniable feature of these geriatric evening soirées. One time a woman collapsed near the front at the Brendan Behan prize-giving and Sebastian spent the next hour staring at her for signs of life, which did not occur.

Still, he was out of it. He had arrived at a time of life when his answer to most of the questions du jour was “Well, I won’t be around to see it.” He had had glory days and he didn’t mind reflecting on them as the procession of staid, well-funded events rolled past that term. In the blauwkrijt^[9] group they had debated radical change. Talk of revolution abounded. But what fired up Sebastian — so much as this disciplined Dutchman let himself get fired up by anything at all — had been the debate about style and form. Wim De Vrees was back from France and had picked up that strange back-and-forth verlan that had grown out of the immigrant communities. Susan Vandelman painted exclamation marks, of which he had a red one back at the house. And Bert de Papus, who set himself the challenge of writing exclusively using words beginning with the letter t; his masterpiece, “T,” was much discussed in their circles. Some nights they challenged each other; to justify, to debate, or perhaps to compose pieces impromptu, to the most absurd and complicated of titles — “Eenhornstraat,” “Cruyff Agonistes,” “de Paapaguys.” Piece after piece was read, debated and shelved, holed up in little tobaccoey flats around the Vondelpark. Most of their stuff was crap, of course, but the blauwkrijt group genuinely, actively, passionately, wrote. This new lot didn’t even talk about it.

Still though, he was out of it; the students that contacted him were unreachable, glazed over, overwhelmed by the plurality and uniformity of their age. He watched the sun going down before his bay windows night after night and felt that his life, too, was setting, and he felt it with nothing but peace.