Saecula Saeculorum – World That Never Ends

Manzoorul Abedin

[This is a biofiction, but let it be said plainly that these episodes are not invented: they happened, in the order and texture described, to a real person, in real rooms, across real years, between SMI (Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam) and I. Spanning between 1997 and 2025, a stretch of time that felt, in the living of it, like several different lives, and feels now, in the looking back, like one continuous and unfinished conversation.]

 

1

 

So here I was, on the front bench. With my notebook and my uncapped pen. The classroom was large, of the old kind – the kind that makes no argument for itself, that simply exists, as it has existed for decades, in a state of permanent yet unapologetic functionality. Ten long wooden benches, perhaps more, ran the length of the room in parallel rows, each one scarred with the anonymous history of generations of students: the ink stains, the initials, the grooves worn smooth by ten thousand restless elbows. Seventy of us, more or less, filled those benches that morning, and the smell of us mingled with the smell of everything else – wet monsoon morning at the University of Dhaka and the dark mineral scent of rain-soaked earth drifting in through the windows. I had taken my usual place on the front bench – by habit, or stubbornness, or some private need to be seen to be present, listening to the room settle behind me and thinking, as I often did in those first minutes before SMI arrived. He taught us Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the first year. I remember, “the poem,” SMI said to me, “is not a prompt for your associations. It is a made thing. Read the whole of it before you decide you have something to say about any part of it.” Then, it was The Prelude in the second year that brought the real reckoning. Wordsworth’s great autobiography of a mind growing into itself demanded a patience I had not yet cultivated, and SMI could hear it in every response I gave. “You are not reading this with attention,” he said one afternoon, not unkindly but with an unmistakable finality, as though attention were not a technique but a moral condition. Back to the present, the first lecture of the third year – SMI arrived without preamble, set his Beowulf textbook on the lectern, looked out at the large room with the expression of a man reviewing a landscape he has crossed many times and still finds worth crossing, and said one word:

 

“Hwæt.”

 

He let the silence do its work. Then: “This word – most scholars translate it as Listen, or Attend. A signal. An oral convention. A way of calling a hall to order before the recitation begins. But I want you to hear something larger in it. I want you to hear a cry. A summon. This word says: What I am about to tell you has weight. What I am about to tell you has already outlasted every man and woman in this room.”

I wrote nothing. I was listening too hard to write.

 

The weeks that followed were unlike the two years before them – something had shifted – in me, perhaps, or in the way the poem itself demanded to be received. We moved through the poem as through a tide. Heorot lit against the darkness. Grendel at the door. The plunge into the mere. The celebrations of a people who know, somewhere beneath the celebration, that the dark is not permanently defeated – only temporarily repelled. I asked fewer questions. When I did speak, I tried to finish the thought before releasing it. SMI noticed. He did not say so directly. But once, after I had offered an observation about the poem’s use of kennings — those compound words that rename familiar things, whale-road for sea, word-hoard for vocabulary, as though the world requires fresh naming to be properly seen; he nodded with something that looked, briefly, almost like satisfaction.

 

“Good,” he said. Just that.

 

It was more than I had expected.

 

The poem moved, in those final weeks, toward its ending, and the ending was an elegy. The young warrior was an old king now. The dragon was the last battle. The meadhall was no longer the guarantor of safety it had once appeared to be. The texture of the verse changed – became slower, heavier, laden with the particular sorrow of things that are concluding. SMI read the lament of the Last Survivor – that unnamed figure who places his people’s treasures in the earth because there is no one left to use them, no one left to inherit the word-hoard, the gold-hoard, the accumulated meaning of a culture:

 

“There is no one left / to whom I should give you or glittering sword. / I have seen the best of what these halls have held. / The days have come and gone.”

 

I looked at him across the lectern, and I saw a man for whom the poem was not an artefact but a mirror. Standing at a lectern in a large, poorly lit classroom, reading about the passing of things, and feeling it:

 

“After many a winter / the good king lay low, / shielded prince at his going, / glorious lord of the Geats.”

 

Thus, the glory passes from generation to generation. I did not say this aloud. I wrote it down when I got home, and I have not forgotten it.

 

 

 

2

 

I stood outside a seminar room on the third floor of a building – of BRAC University – that I knew well but had never entered quite this way. I was there to give a teaching demonstration for the post of a lecturer. The panel was inside. Six people around a table. A senior administrator I did not know. A Professor from a neighbouring department. Two other colleagues whose expressions I had not yet learned to read. A junior lecturer of my age, almost – young, alert, with the particular sharpness of someone who has recently survived what I was about to attempt. And SMI. I had not known he would be there. Or rather, I had not known he would be there – positioned at the far end of the table where all the sight lines converged, looking entirely at ease in a room where ease was not on offer.

 

My topic was vocabulary acquisition in adult language learners – specifically, the question of how learners move from passive recognition to active, generative use of new words. I had chosen it partly because I found it genuinely interesting and partly because it gave me room to move, to improvise, to teach around the topic as much as through it, which was, I knew, the real test.

 

I began well. I drew a distinction on the board between knowing a word and owning a word. I asked the room to think about words they could define if pressed but would never reach for spontaneously. I talked about depth of processing – the idea that a word learned in context, connected to feeling and experience, puts down deeper roots than a word memorised in a list.

 

Someone asked about assessment. I answered as directly as I could. The Professor from the neighbouring department asked about methodology. Also handled.

 

Then SMI spoke.

 

He had said nothing until this point. He had sat with his hands folded and the expression of a man at a concert he has not yet decided whether to enjoy. “Before I ask about anything else,” he said, in the same even tone he had used in my Dhaka University days, “I want to ask you something more fundamental.”

 

I waited.

 

“You have worked,” he said, with the slight pause of a man who has read an application thoroughly and found it interesting, “as a copywriter at an advertising firm. As a subeditor on an international news desk. As a voice-over artist. As a communication specialist at an international NGO.” He looked at me across the table. “That is a rather remarkable collection of lives already. What made you leave each of them, and what has made you decide that this is the one you will stay in?”

 

The room shifted. This was not about vocabulary acquisition. I heard, somewhere behind my sternum, Yeats:

 

I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

“Each of those careers,” I said slowly, “was a way of working with language. And I was competent at all of them. But competence isn’t vocation.”

 

I looked back at SMI. I paused.

 

“In a classroom,” I said, “your free expression of your language is the product. You don’t have to apologise for stopping to look at the thing.” Then SMI said, with the faintest suggestion of a smile that no one else at the table would have caught: “And is that a discovery you made on your own, or a discovery someone helped you make?” The question was generous. It was him giving me the language to acknowledge something that had already passed between us – something unsaid, over years, that had been leading here.

 

“Both,” I said. “In that order.”

 

He knew my fortes. He always had. Afterwards, in the corridor, he was waiting with his coat already on.

 

“That part about language and freedom, write that up. It’s better than anything in your application.”

 

He moved toward the lift, then paused.

 

“I told you, didn’t I? Years ago. That this was where you were going – academia”

 

The lift arrived. He stepped into it and was gone. And I stood in the corridor with the particular feeling of a person who has arrived at a place someone else saw for them long before they could see it themselves. I thought of the Irish Airman, Yeats’s great cold arithmetic of a life honestly weighed:

 

I balanced all, brought all to mind, / the years to come seemed waste of breath, / a waste of breath the years behind / in balance with this life, this death.

 

Not despair. Something more like arrival. The finding of the one thing, after the long search through all the other things, that does not feel like compromise.

 

 

3

 

There is a moment in the Iliad when Nestor – the oldest of the kings before Troy, the one who carries memory the way other men carry shields, who has watched two generations rise and fall – sits beside Agamemnon in his doubt and speaks with the authority that only time honestly earned can confer. I thought of this often in the years after I started working as an academic – first in Bangladesh and then in England. I was struggling with the pressures of the neoliberal university of our time. Of the texture of metrics. Of student satisfaction scores and module evaluation forms. Of impact assessments and effectiveness frameworks and of the texture of being asked, repeatedly and in subtly different registers, whether you are producing value. And then there was the newer pressure – the one that arrived with social media and did not announce itself as a demand but as an opportunity. The opportunity to have opinions in public. To educate. To position oneself, legibly and at pace, on the right side of the ongoing argument about everything. To build, in the language of the platforms, a presence. I had begun to feel this pull. I was also struggling with the political pressures that life inside an institution generates: the need to belong to camps without always knowing which camps exist, to signal allegiance without always knowing what allegiance costs, to remain fair while understanding that fairness in a resource-scarce environment is never as neutral as it appears.

 

I brought this to SMI, now retired and visiting England, one afternoon, over tea. He listened in his characteristic way – genuinely listening, not composing his reply while I spoke. When I finished, he said: “Do you know who reads you on social media?” I said I had a reasonable sense of it. “You do not,” he said, firmly. “You know who you think reads you. You know who responds, who shares, who comments. But you have no idea who reads between the lines. Who belongs to a political camp you haven’t mapped. Who will take what you have argued about curriculum and hear something else entirely. Who will remember this, without ever referencing it, three years from now when you are sitting across from them and neither of you will acknowledge what is in the room.”

 

He picked up his mug.

 

“Social media is not a classroom. In a classroom you know who is present. You can read the room, adjust, be wrong and recover. Online, you speak into a darkness full of people you cannot see, and you have no idea what shape they are giving to what you have said.”

 

I started to say something about the responsibility to speak, about silence as complicity.

 

He held up one hand.

 

“I am not advising silence,” he said. “I am advising discernment. There is no political gain worth the cost of your integrity, and the pursuit of it – the need to be seen to be correct, to be affirmed by the right people, to perform the correct positions – will corrupt your thinking before you notice. You will begin to write for the applause. You will hear the applause before you have finished the thought. And then the thinking will have become something else.”

 

He paused.

 

I also told him that as a teacher I was effective but not exceptional, popular but not beloved to my students in England. “Do you believe that what you are doing in your classroom is true? Not popular. Not effective in the measurable sense. True?, SMI throws a rhetorical question at me. I nodded I thought so. “Teach well. Be honest with students about what the subject demands of them. Don’t perform enthusiasm you do not feel, and don’t suppress enthusiasm you do feel. The rest of this …” he paused briefly, ” – is weather. You do not stop going outside because the forecast is uncertain.” I looked at him. “Ulysses,” he said. “The old adventurer who refuses to become merely a king sitting in his hall, growing careful and satisfied. He has been shaped by everything he has encountered – the good of it and the difficult of it – and he will not pretend otherwise, and he will not stop.” He looked at me steadily. “You have been shaped by more than you acknowledge. The careers. The migration. From east to west. The different kinds of language. The different kinds of pressure. All of it is yours. Don’t let anyone else’s narrative about you override the one you have been living.” “Do not go gentle into that good night.” “The Agamemnons are everywhere,” SMI said. “Power without wisdom.” He turned back from the window. “Be a Nestor,” he said. “Not yet. But aim for it.”

 

4

 

SMI is no more. I do not yet know what to do with that fact, so I have been turning it over in the way one turns a stone before setting it down in a permanent place. What I notice – and this is strange, and I am still learning not to be afraid of it – is that he has not entirely left. I was teaching last week. Second-year students, on personal narrative voice in dissertation, a seminar going well until it began to drift in the way seminars drift when the thread is almost but not quite found. A student offered a reflection that was interesting but unfinished – a thought released too early, still warm, not quite formed. And I heard myself say to the student: “Read the whole of the text before you decide you have something to say about any part of it.” I heard the sentence before I fully understood what I had said. I heard the precise, unhurried quality of it – not hostile, not dismissive, but pressing. A probe. A refusal to let vagueness stand where clarity was possible.

 

I heard SMI.

 

And later, closing the session, I used the word stewardship in a way I had never used it before – speaking about what it means to be trusted with a text, to carry it forward without diminishing it – and a student wrote it down, and I thought: where did that come from? It came from SMI. He is in my gestures and my silences and my standards. He is in the moment when I choose not to answer a question immediately – when I wait, and the room waits with me, and the thinking deepens in the pause. He is in the paper I am still too honest to write quickly. He is in the walk I take at the end of a difficult afternoon, looking at the old library, to find it beautiful. He is in the voice I hear when I am about to drift toward the expedient, the applause-worthy, the safely aligned – that quiet, unhurried interior voice: To thine own self be true. And Tennyson’s Ulysses, who said: I am a part of all that I have met – which means the people who have shaped us are not behind us, separated by time and loss, but inside us, woven into whoever we have become. His voice, clearly, irremovably, speaks out in the middle of my ordinary moments. SMI is quiet today. But the fire he lit in me is still lit. And somewhere in the warmth of it, he is still here – not haunting but accompanying. A permanent interior presence that knows me at least as well as I know myself, and that will not, I think, go gentle. The closest thing I know to a word for this is saecula saeculorum. World that never ends.