Dream Log: Girlfriend Trouble

In last night's dream there was no pandemic. The time was 2020, but I was 35 years younger (early 20's.)

I dreamed I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as I was in the 1980's. I haven't been to Knoxville since 1992. I dreamed a university which looked much different than the one I attended: much more shiny and imposing-looking. Many more huge exterior glass walls on campus buildings.

I have no idea how much my dream university resembled the actual UT. But I have seen some recent photos and I know that the place has changed a lot.

I was hanging out with a fellow student I dated briefly in 1985, and two of her women friends. In the dream, we had just met. We were sitting on couches inside the big glass wall of a campus building. Then she and I kissed for the first time, and I was very happy about that. In real life, I really liked being her boyfriend and would've liked to continue it longer. It was she who dumped me. She was a little bit on the heavy side, but very cute. For purposes of reducing confusion, let's call her Kate.

Then, in the dream, one of her friends -- let's call her Amy -- was suddenly all over me, hugging me, kissing me, rubbing my shoulders and my scalp, climbing all over me like a gymnast on an apparatus. Amy was lean and athletic and very pretty, and although I felt guilty about feeling this way, I was suddenly much more attracted to her than to Kate. I hadn't noticed Amy much at all before she jumped on me.

I didn't know what to do. I felt like I owed it to Kate to continue with her, but I wanted much more to be with Amy. And I felt that it would be dishonest to stay with Kate if that was not what I really wanted.

And, I had to remind myself, I had just met these women, and I had absolutely no idea what they wanted, so that, for example, by thinking that I owed something to Kate, I was assuming something about her intentions.

The third woman never touched me and plays no further role in this dream.

Next, the four of us were separated, and I was running around, looking for -- Amy, although I felt guilty about that, although I had met both Kate and Amy only minutes before. I caught up to Amy on a landing on a huge, multi-story, escalator. On the other side of another huge glass wall students were sitting at rows of PC's. (Is that an unrealistic detail? Would university students today all use their own laptops and/or other mobile devices? Would the poorer students use PC's provided by the university? Would it vary from university to university? I don't know.)

Amy jumped on me again and we made out, not caring who was looking. The pleasure, at least for me, was incredible. I wanted to talk about what was happening, and I was getting more and more worried that Amy was going to be done with me soon -- maybe as soon as a few minutes -- and that this would never happen again. Or that she would just make out with me, or with anybody else, if and when she chose, and would feel no need to commit to me. I started to get pessimistic about it, and to feel as if I had already been dumped, while we were still making out. I thought: what could the odds possibly be that Amy was as emotionally invested in this as I was? What could the odds possibly be that I was as impressive sensually as she was to me? Then I woke up.

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.