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Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of athletes in space.
Hamlet, II:2, as paraphrased by Jordan Kovacs
That same chilly morning that Ricardo Rodríguez was fired, after an imperious confrontation with his athletic director in which he only for one instant stooped to sentimentality and fear, I noticed a new advertisement for some smartphone or another had been posted on the billboards of Interstate 8; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series.
One month later I had left San Diego de Alcalá for good and while setting up my office in Schembechler Hall, I was greeted by my predecessor, one Calvino Argentino Magi, who now holds some sort of subordinate position on a stravenue in the outskirts to the north of Sonora. Calvino Argentino is a substantial, black-haired man of refined features. His football activity was constant, passionate, and versatile, but in Ann Arbor it was ultimately insignificant.
On February 8, 2011, I took the liberty of enriching him with an offer of a bottle of Bell’s Winter White Ale. Calvino Argentino tasted it, pronounced it “interesting,” and, after a few snifters, launched into a poem on which he had been working for many years called the Augural Canto, Prologurial Canto, or simply Prologue-Canto.
I begged him to read me a passage, even if only a brief one. He open a desk drawer (one of the drawers which I had not yet cleaned), took out a tall stack of tablet paper stamped with the letterhead of the Bentley Historical Library, and read with ringing self-satisfaction:
There is no life - no life without its hunger;
Each restless heart beats so imperfectly;
But when you come and I am filled with wonder,
Sometimes, I think I glimpse eternity.
