December 23, 2020:

By the time they closed my college I was already done. I'd absorbed as much as it could give, so that it was time to move on.

This does not mean I'd accomplished a rounded or even adequate undergraduate education. Far from it. Because of the intersection of Johnston's graduate-like seminar style plus amorphous graduation requirements with my specific personal concerns, I effectively had a Masters-level grasp of bits and pieces of French Poststructuralism, a very deep understanding of Freud, quite a detailed grasp of the Annales School, definitely a graduate-level immersion in Ulysses, and realistically the list stops there.

I would like to have gone far deeper in continental Philosophy, but Professor Falstaff was not a credible resource. He had no intention of being helpful, and by the end I had little confidence in his knowledge. With that ceiling reached there was no longer a reason to stay.

My major positive takeaway from that school was a vastly deepened ability to read. Thanks to the Poststructuralism I'd grasped the concept of a reading, that is, reading by protocol. Reading for gaps and silences, where a writer says her intention is X but she actually does Y. A life skill. If you're going to list the things education can do for you, this IMO would be the top of the top. This, and typing.

Forty years later I am effectively a permanent graduate student, reading the works which have evolved from the ones I found useful. Yet I have an autodidact's patchwork understanding: very deep here, very shallow there. This was inevitable. It's the logic that was activated in fourth grade, when I rejected school.