While it requires more than one reading, the dean’s memo is also artful in its way. It performs a perlocutionary wonder, simultaneously filling the tenure-track (“probationary”) faculty member with existential dread and intellectual smugness. Why is the goal “excellence” in teaching but only “productivity” in scholarship? Does this mean I can get away with producing crap, as long as I produce it in sufficient quantities? As long as I keep fertilizing the fields of knowledge?

Actually, we shouldn’t be too hard on the dean, who is a capable administrator and a talented scholar. The chances that she wrote or even read this sentence are slim. It is much more likely that one of her assistants copied and pasted it from some other letter, where it had been copied and pasted from yet another letter, and so on, back to a lunch meeting when an ad hoc committee of senior faculty members with kids and credit-card bills and elderly aunts in the hospital and papers to grade sat down and composed it over “lunch provided.”

To Alsana’s mind the real difference between people was not colour. Nor did it lie in gender, faith, and their relative ability to dance a syncopated rhythm or open their fists to reveal a handful of gold coins. The real difference was far more fundamental. It was in the earth. It was in the sky. You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire:

a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
c) Is there a chance (and please tick the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a keyring or a hairclip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure of eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow the government on a whim, why not blind the man you hated, why not go mad, go gibbering though the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you — or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire.

Zadie Smith-White Teeth