Summer session is one of the smaller academic territories. It used to be limited to a handful of obsessive or otherwise needy students and professors, most driven by some imperative never to let any period go unproductive of credit or cash. On the whole, I've enjoyed summer session most of my academic life. Among other things, it was an occasion for working holidays. Lately, though, it has become like a newly discovered mountain or seaside retreat crowded with those seeking cheap vacations.

I began to take summer classes toward the end of high school when I couldn't find a job. One summer I learned touch typing; my first year at The City College of New York, I completed a calculus course. As a graduate student at Columbia University, I took concentrated summer courses to satisfy requirements calling for a patiently developed mastery, Old English and History of the English Language, for example. The intensive, daily immersion in such dense subjects kept delicately developed insights from slipping away. I remember afternoons getting lost in my reading in Butler Library and suddenly realizing I was sitting in a pool of sweat.

I treated myself as well at Columbia to the pleasure of sitting before celebrated professors from other campuses, E. Talbot Donaldson of Yale, Samuel Holt Monk of Minnesota. With Donaldson, I enjoyed the luxury of reading Chaucer simply as literature since he took for granted that we had mastered the gritty linguistics of Middle English during the regular year. In Monk's early morning class I had my first insight into the dependence of Dryden on Milton, a glimmer that became my doctoral dissertation.