William Ian Miller on "Losing It"

One of the rites of passage of a Michigan Law School education is taking a course with William Ian Miller, the leading scholar in the world of the medieval Icelandic sagas and author of a series of books--The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard, 1998), The Mystery of Courage (Harvard, 2000), Faking It (Cambridge, 2005), and Eye for an Eye (Cambridge, 2007)--about, well, the whole range of virtues and vices. I don't know if I learned much *law* (of the kind you need to know on the bar exam) from Bill, but I did learn a lot about everything else, which maybe all comes back to law and life in the end. He has a delightful (and typically Miller-esque) essay (based on a new book) in the current Chronicle of Higher Education about passing 65:

I am 65, and I think my brain just hopped a bullet train heading south, leaving a shadow of itself behind, just enough to let me worry whether it is time to close up shop, before the people in gray close it up for me. Will I know when I am an embarrassment? Do my younger colleagues, sometimes very much younger, already know? Am I missing the hints that they are sending my way? Will anyone show up for my retirement dinner? Will I? Will my memory still be good enough to recall everyone who did not show up, so that I can even up the score? And just how would I, feeble and without the wit, manage that? Will I be able to come up with their names, should I manage to recall their faces? And why am I consumed with fears about that dinner some five years before it will take place in exactly the same way I would lie awake at nights worrying about botching my bar mitzvah three years before I had to go on stage and man up in the Jewish way? But then once you, yes you, stop worrying about ridiculous things like this, you'll have not only lost touch with the world, but with yourself.