Shipwrecked in a shrinking sea of time

I'm in the middle of a lively class discussion digging deeply into how Stephen Crane draws attention to the way his characters' perceptions distort their understanding of events as they bob on the sea in that tiny dinghy, but then I glance at the clock--only five minutes left and so many miles to row!--and I have to scramble to keep my head above water as we try to bring "The Open Boat" safely to shore. 

I like to structure class discussions so ideas build toward new understanding--not just floundering in a sea of ideas but fixing a course toward firm ground. Lately, though, I've been getting swamped. Why do I keep running out of time? 

I start class promptly and I rarely keep a class one minute over our allotted time, but this semester I'm always racing to pack everything in before everyone packs up and leaves. Part of the reason, I think, is that my classes are a little bigger than usual this semester: more talkers = more talk. But I also feel retirement breathing down my neck and I know I have a limited opportunity to teach students everything I know and then I panic when I realize that I can't, and even if I could, how would I test them on all that?

Two years until retirement (ideally) but I'm already feeling the onset of endings. I doubt that I'll teach the sophomore seminar again, which is no great loss, but was last semester my final chance to teach Honors Literature? Will I ever teach the theory course again? I doubt that Creative Nonfiction will roll around in the rotation again before I'm ready to retire, but at least I'll get one more stab at the senior capstone course. 

I feel this sense of urgency both inside and outside of class, this impulse to impart insight that will make a lasting impression on someone--anyone--so I won't just fade into irrelevance. But eventually irrelevance comes for us all, as Stephen Crane points out in one of his bleak little poems:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

The universe is not obliged to provide me opportunities to leave my mark, but it does occasionally deposit me on shore, where, like the shipwrecked men in Crane's "The Open Boat," I can look back upon the sea with new understanding:

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt they could then be interpreters. 

"What does the sea tell them?" I ask my students as the clock ticks away in the final seconds of class. My time is up and I can't find words and so I hold up the book and show them Crane's remarkable story and I say, "It tells them this."

Our time is up. We've reached the shore in a sorry state, but at least I've given them something solid to take away.