FOURTH NIGHT

LAST SEPTEMBER I found myself in the bizarre situation of once again being—and I still can’t say it without an unsettling jolt of bewilderment—a student.   Months earlier, while I was still in the army, I learned that I had received a Chevening scholarship for Cypriots through the British Council.  The award entitled me to a fully funded one-year Masters in the U.K.  Twelve months, all expenses paid, a kind of unexpected manna from heaven.

I’d been out of school for almost a decade and so it was inevitable for me to initially suffer from a minor identity crisis that comes from the déjà vu feeling of being caught up—albeit in this lifetime—in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal recurrence.  It was impossible to not feel that I had regressed in some fundamental way.  But phobias and flashbacks aside, I soon found that study in the U.K.—where instructors neither hold hands nor wield whips—was especially well-suited to us older sorts who are referred to, despite the lack of evidence, as ‘mature students.’
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