The saddest man I know works down the hall from me, on the fourth floor of a very old academic building. He's a lecturer in mathematics, a privatdocent in the modern sense, which is to say, the title retains its suggestion of low salary, but doesn't confer the old sense of intellectualism. The lecturers at the college where I'm a graduate student are generally a sad lot, stillborn academics or educated housewives looking for a diversion. They are essentially professional TA's, teaching low level math classes to the slackjawed, and enjoy neither the respect of the faculty nor the glint of future brilliance which shines from some of the graduate students. The men among them are particularly strange for their acceptance of their lower caste position, politely ignored in superficial conversation with other members of the department. It is, in short, a pathetic job.

What's funny is that the saddest man is on the surface the most depressing representative of the class to which he belongs, moping slumpshouldered down the halls, and riding the elevator with downcast eyes, a copy of Math 101 pressed under one well chalked arm. But lately in the instances where he meets my eye, I've begun to notice something else. He has a certain precision of speech which he summons on demand to season certain points he wants to emphasize, and this version of himself--the version lost in high speech--seems completely separate from the man as a math instructing drone. Here he has penetration, which one sees is repressed, like a knife sequestered in a coat pocket, during his day to day affairs.

He loves a woman who works downstairs, an Audry Hepburn type, aging as he is, though still desirable. It's hard to say if his unrequited passion for the aging vixen, you'll have to take my word that's a fair description, increases or diminishes him. Part of what I suspect is that he is a deliberate romantic, that he has thrown himself upon the drudgery of his life as an act of deliberate sacrifice. His vocabulary and strange phrasings bolster the theory that his career means little to him, that it's just a shield for a passion that lies somewhere hidden. The averted eyes and faculty snubs do not touch him, because the world inside the old building is not the real place he lives and works; it represents nothing of him and he wears it like a cowl, an inverse Scarlet Pimpernil. I think he looks out from behind his bleared blue eyes with the knowledge that he is a child with his face pressed against the inner surface of a transparent cell, and I think even as the old face sags, he smiles.