University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

To study the past is to engage long-dead characters and distant events, through which one tries in vain to inhabit the very aim of one’s endeavor. In his poetry of memory and loss, Cavafy captured the luminous nostalgia and cultivated melancholy that permeates the mere act of evoking ancient names: Ithaca as a journey rather than a destination; Mark Antony, abandoned by his god and leaving Alexandria; Byzantine emperors and crepuscular poets; and, at the root of all remembrance, the desire that has passed without fulfillment.