This chapter began as an ‘Intellectual Trajectory’, one of a series of talks at Yale's Henry Koerner Center for emeriti faculty, in which colleagues look back on how they came to study and to teach what they did, how they became what they are. I imagine an ‘intellectual trajectory’ should, in the manner of many a novel, tell the story of a vocation. Such is the outcome of the three thousand pages of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, for instance. But that doesn't quite correspond to my experience: I didn't find a vocation so much as drift into one.

There are many places I might begin to track that drift. Somehow, ninth grade (I was age 14) stands out. My parents to my disgust had just moved the family from New York City, where I grew up and which I loved, and where I had learned to travel up and down town on the Madison Avenue bus if not yet the subway, to the Connecticut suburbs. I was resentful and bored – too young to have a driver's licence, I couldn't get anywhere. I spent the year as I recall sitting in the same comfortable chair reading books, of any description. I never quite recovered from that. But to be honest it led me into academic life only by default, and without my quite knowing it. After graduating from Harvard and spending a year in England and France, I returned there for graduate school because I felt I had so much more to learn, not realising that graduate study would largely be a narrowing experience, and that when completed I’d be fit for nothing but university teaching. I chose comparative literature because it seemed capacious, really a way of avoiding a decision on what I wanted to study.