To the Nth Degree

I regularly have one of those dreams when it’s the final exam for a college class I’ve failed to attend all semester (and I often can’t even recall where the classroom is located). I can’t imagine how many of these dreams Benjamin Bolger has. “Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s.” (And he’s still only within six degrees of Kevin Bacon.) Joseph Bernstein in the NYT Magazine (Gift Article): The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Going to College. “There’s something almost anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reason he gives for spending the past 30-odd years pursuing college degrees. ‘I love learning,’ he told me over lunch last year, without even a touch of irony. I had been pestering him for the better part of two days, from every angle I could imagine, to offer some deeper explanation for his life as a perpetual student. Every time I tried, and failed, I felt irredeemably 21st-century, like an extra in a historical production who has forgotten to remove his Apple Watch.”