… lying on both sides of us. We’re somewhere south of Boston, and the Quiet Car is a laptop monastery of strict observance. You don’t dare cough.

The calm water, the pale sky, the thin clouds, the soft train rocking — it’s one hell of a tranquillizing setting. The thing, the custom, the routine, the practice, is to nod off at your screen, to gaze at your computer until your eyes deaden and you zone out.

When you reenter the cloister, the open water’s gone. It’s swamp now, with scruffy trees fronting industrial sheds.

I feel intimate enough with the guy across the table from me – a big guy, young, with an OLD GUYS RULE baseball cap and a CAPE COD BASEBALL SUMMERTIME TRADITION t-shirt – to have, post-nap, elaborately adjusted my bra in front of him. We’ve shared this corner of the library for hours. He has plugged my computer in for me. He has told me to expect that when the train slows down our wi-fi connection will get messed up.

Speaking of connections — some strange and unsettling ones for UD among the people at this Harvard event. Straussianism, the University of Chicago, and Allan Bloom are not exactly unknowns for ol’ UD.

In 1979, or 1980, my friend Kevin, a fellow literature grad student at the University of Chicago (now a big shot lawyer) said I had to take a course with Allan Bloom. “You’ll love him. I promise. You will absolutely love him.”

Bloom’s course on Rousseau fit my schedule, but I knew nothing about him, and, unlike another course that I’d taken outside the English department – the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s course on metaphor – Rousseau wasn’t that interesting to me. I decided to sit in on a class and check it out.

I sat midway up in a white lecture theater on a bright afternoon and waited in a roomful of men for Bloom to appear. He did, right on time, preceded by a cloud of smoke and the sound of hacking.

There was such chaotic energy to him that right away the students in the room seemed statues and Bloom the only living thing.

Once I got a good look at him, I realized Bloom was the man I’d seen one cold afternoon last semester at The Point, a lakefront park near the university. This man was big – very broad, very tall – and wore an absolutely amazing coat of gleaming brown fur all over his body, down to the ground. He looked haunted. A haunted seal.

I thought of the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” of its main character John Marcher on his way to visit his friend May Bartram’s grave. Maybe Marcher’s name came to me because this man, with his massive, somehow military coat, and his heavy gait, seemed a sort of soldier on a march.

I’d also seen Bloom, I realized, one beautiful afternoon on campus when I was sitting on a little hill in front of the Divinity Building and Saul Bellow walked by. I sat up to get a good look at the person who wrote Herzog, a book that from the first time I read it (I must have been fourteen) had a terrifically strong impact on me. This man, the brown seal, John Marcher, was Bellow’s walking companion.

So, no more glimpses; this was the real thing, front and center, all lit up by the sun and the bright white lecture hall.

I sensed the high-strung attentiveness in the men around me, but eh. For me, it wasn’t working. For me, Bloom was all neurotic foreground, and I couldn’t work my way to the background. Maybe if the subject matter had already drawn me to it… But I wasn’t a political philosopher. Ricoeur’s course on metaphor worked perfectly for me (though I didn’t do very well in it) because much of it was ultimately getting at what made literary language weird and powerful. But Rousseau, especially in the hands of this strange man, wasn’t doing it for me.