I got up at 5:00 on Tuesday and, after yoga, had time for one more hour of studying before I had to leave to write my Continental Philosophy exam. I printed up the pages of my study documents, stapled them together and then headed for Trinity College.
It was raining a little more than a
spray, but just enough to get me damp by the time I got to Hoskin and St
George.
The porter’s office was just inside the
main door and so with his directions I had no trouble finding Seeley Hall,
where the exam room was already delineated. Then however I had to go back
downstairs to ask the porter where the washroom was. I received a long set of
directions that led me along two halls and down a stairway to a very hot
pipe-lined basement where the men’s washroom happened to be.
When I got back to the first floor, I ran
into Naama, who was lost because she hadn’t asked the porter for directions. I
led her to the examination area, but there were no places to sit outside the
room, so we sat on the landing between the first and second floor on a stage
upon which were mounted several trophies behind a glass case.
Naama had gotten her feet wet while
walking to Trinity, so she took her long boots off to set them beside the
radiator for about ten minutes, then she put them back on and went out for a
cigarette.
The exam room opened while she was gone.
I sat at the very front with a large portrait of a young Queen Victoria on my
upper right and one of Prince Albert on my upper left. They looked like they
might be about the age they were when they first got married.
Unlike some examinations at U of T, we
didn’t have to put our bags and coats at the front of the room, but they rather
trusted us with our bags under our chairs and our jackets slung over the backs.
The TA that was officiating over our exam
was an attractive and shapely young woman of East Indian descent in shiny black
lycra tights. For the first few minutes of the exam I had a front seat to the
professor flirting with her in whispers until I finally raised my hand to get
their attention and told them, “I’m sorry, but I’m finding your whispering very
distracting.” They nodded and shut up for the rest of the exam.
Exam essays are always weird to write. I
always feel like my thoughts are infantile and yet I almost always do fine in
the final result. I spent the first hour writing an essay on Levinas’s concept
of the face. I talked about the fact that the face of the other can only affect
us because we have a face. The face of the other arrives naked on our horizon
and proves to us that we do not know ourselves by having a perspective of us
that we can never have. The face arrives in a state of distress, but I don’t
quite understand that unless it’s a reflection of the distress we feel on being
exposed by the face of the other, so that’s what I wrote about. In the second
hour I wrote on Derrida’s idea of our relationship to Being and how from the
perspective of sensory experience we are closer to nothing more than Being,
while from the point of view of thinking about Being there is nothing further
away than Being. I started speculating on whether my cat is closer to Being
because it doesn’t think about it, but I added that Derrida would say that cats
don’t have being at all. I suggested that it is impossible to think about Being
without becoming distanced from it. I’ll be interested in a couple of weeks to
see what marks that my speculations earned or lost.
With about twenty minutes left I looked
to my left and saw that Naama had finished her exam early and taken off. I was
disappointed because we’d arranged to have coffee afterwards but it turned out
that she’d forgot and had an appointment anyway.
With about ten minutes to go I had to
stop because I’d written a phrase that looked like a conclusion and anything
added after it would have seemed awkward.
I shook hands with Professor Gibbs, telling him
that I enjoyed the course and his lectures, then I headed home. I was relieved
to be done with studying for four and a half months.
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