“If you know more when you graduate from college than you did when you started, you have wasted your money.” When I tell this to first-years advisees, I sometimes catch them trying not to roll their eyes.  But roll your eyes all you want, I stand by what I have said, because I speak from experience:  not only my own undergraduate years, but my experience since then as well.  So far I have published twelve books, with two more in the works, on various subjects, including a couple of major German and Austrian writers, history and theory of European drama, history of poetry, highbrow literacy and aesthetics in their relation to totalitarian politics, ethics as a problem, feminism.  And whenever I finish a book—in the moment when I think, “It’s done, anything more will just be tidying up,” in the moment when by rights I should be savoring my achievement—I invariably find that I have only succeeded in bringing more clearly into focus the same basic ignorance that had driven me to write in the first place.