The Ingenious Philosopher, David Quixote Of El Pais Del Norte
DEREK MAUS
click here to download this adventure as a pdf
Dear readers, before we begin our gently fictionalized tale about a man frequently accused through the years of “tilting at wind turbines,” I wish to remind you of a salient point whether it’s been a while since you have read Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605–1615), or if you’ve never read the novel (believe me, it’s worth it…) but are nevertheless familiar with the adjective “quixotic” that it subsequently bestowed upon the English language.
I would give you the definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English, but the college library was forced by endless budget cuts to cancel our institutional access to that resource some time ago, so I will have to fall back on the tried-and-true method found in essays written for introductory courses on every campus in the land and cite the definition from whichever dictionary comes up first in a Google search (in my case, the Merriam-Webster):
Quixotic, adj. (quix·ot·ic, kwik-'sä-tik)
1: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals
especially: marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action
2 : capricious, unpredictable
Each of these meanings implies that someone referred to as quixotic is somehow a societal problem, because they are “impractical” fools detached from reality by their “pursuit of ideals,” their “lofty romantic ideas,” or their inherent “unpredictability.”
The stunningly important point about Cervantes’s novel that such definitions miss, though, is that Don Quixote is hardly the biggest fool presented within its pages. Although there is little doubt that the chivalric ideals found in the books that inspire—and occasionally delude—Don Quixote are long past the peak of their popularity and influence, they are ultimately far less pernicious and malevolent than the values that guide the myriad figures associated with government, the clergy, the military, academia, and other centers of power in a seventeenth-century Spanish society that considers Quixote nothing more than a dotty relic of a bygone age.
Much in the way that Voltaire’s eighteenth-century protagonist Candide is embedded in a world of treacherously violent rogues and scoundrels that make his own blind spots seem benign by comparison, Don Quixote’s main defect is that the virtues he espouses were deemed hopelessly archaic and nonsensical by a Spanish ruling class that had been ascendant since at least the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (the pair that, you may recall, sent Christopher Columbus on his voyages of “discovery,” when they weren’t busy banishing non-Catholics from their joint kingdom…) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This new set of elites largely failed to replace Quixote’s ideals with anything that retained the inherent love and humanism that is at the core of his admittedly erratic performance as a would-be knight-errant.
To be sure, Don Quixote makes plentiful mistakes and succumbs to excesses of zeal—as most of us who aspire to change the world for the better are prone to do—but the brilliant novelist Carlos Fuentes explains why these are not fatal flaws in an essay (“Don Quixote, or the Critique of Reading,” Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 1977, pp. 186–202) that is nearly as old as I am:
In [the character of] Don Quixote, the values of the age of chivalry acquire, through love, a democratic resonance; and the values of the democratic life acquire the resonance of nobility. Don Quixote refuses both the cruel power of the mighty and the herd instinct of the lowly. His vision of humanity is not based on the lowest common denominator but on the highest achievement possible. His conception of love and justice saves both the oppressors and the oppressed from an oppression that perverts both. It is through this ethical stance that Cervantes struggles to bridge the old and new worlds. (201)
Fuentes’s words, especially his insistence that Don Quixote remains inherently ethical amidst his apparent madness, made me ponder the two-plus decades of my friendship and collaboration with David Curry as a shared quixotic life. I confess that I would be immensely proud if he ever felt me to have ever played the squirely—and possibly squirrelly—role of Sancho Panza during that time (happily, the analogue to Dulcinea del Toboso in his life was decidedly never a delusion of a fevered mind…).
And with those prefatory words now completed, let us move on to our brief homage.
* * *
IN A VILLAGE in El Pais del Norte, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a book upon a reading table at all times, a well-worn basketball in the garage, a leash for walking the dog near the front door, and perhaps a cigarette or two more than is good for him close at hand. The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on…well, bordering on something above thirty and below eighty, let’s just say. He was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser, and a supremely dedicated teacher. They will have it that his surname was Curry or Royal-Pain-in-the-Ass (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject…), although from all reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was a Quixote through and through, even if that name appeared nowhere on the official documents that attested to his identity. This, however, is of little importance to my tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair’s breadth from the truth in the telling of it.
You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which, as every elected official representing El Pais del Norte knows full well, was mostly all the year round when it comes to all those ne’er-do-well eggheads…) gave himself up to reading books of philosophy with such ardor and avidity that he often entirely neglected other aspects of his life, even the trimming of either his lawn or his facial hair. There were none he liked so well as those that covered the questions about the role of ethics in human life, whether authored by ancient Greeks (not bloody Romans, though…), the thinkers/drinkers named in Monty Python’s “Philosophers Song,” or even on rare occasions one of those contemporary navel-gazers who had the good fortune not to be rotting in their graves just yet. Over ideas of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have muddled through had provided this gentleman with his life’s special purpose.
He became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise and his days from dawn to dark poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dessicated that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books—justice, beneficence/non-malevolence, truthfulness, integrity, autonomy, the ability of language to convey meaning, and all sorts of other impossible nonsense—and it so possessed his mind that to him nothing in the world seemed to have more reality in it.
In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever a maniac in this world hit upon; he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor and the service of humanity, that he should make a philosophy professor of himself, roaming the world over (or at least the classrooms, lecture halls, and meeting rooms in which he could find an audience, willing or captive) to dispute verbally with others about the ideas he found in his readings. He would thereby work towards righting as many kind of wrongs as possible, while exposing himself to peril and danger from which he was to reap not only a trifling paycheck that might enable him to feed and clothe himself and his family, but possibly also a measure of esteem (or at least grudging respect) from his peers and community.
The first thing he did was to clean up some armor that had belonged to his ancestors and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. In other words, he got accepted to a graduate program at the Universidad de Virginia, finished a dissertation about some Hellenic prattle he called the “Flux and the Forms” that was apparently an elaborate construction made out of Play-Doh, and soon thereafter got himself at job at a plucky little liberal arts college in the frosty woodlands of El Pais del Norte that at the time still experienced both lengthy stretches of bitterly cold winter weather and marginally sufficient levels of state funding.
In the longstanding tradition of humanities professors everywhere, he soon proceeded to acquire a workmanlike means of transport that would convey him back and forth between his country estate and the halls of academe in which his noble disputations would ensue. Visiting a local dealership, he inspected a minivan that “sicut erat rubigo et strepitus” bore an uncanny resemblance to the Hudson Super Six driven to California by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Nevertheless, it surpassed in his eyes Jay Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce, the Great Red Shark from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or even KITT from Knight Rider. Four days he spent thinking about what name to give it, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a vehicle belonging to a philosopher so soon to be famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the calling he himself was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling it Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and signifying its condition before it became what it now was, the first and foremost of all the beater minivans in the world.
Meanwhile Quixote worked upon a newly hired assistant professor in the English department, an honest man (if indeed that title can be given to one whose foolishness is made so manifestly clear by his choice of profession…) with very little sense inside his pate. In an email sent from his quixotdc@malditasollas.edu account, he so talked him over with such persuasions and promises that the poor clown made up his mind to sally forth with him and serve him as a squire. Quixote, among other things, told him he ought to be ready to go with him gladly because at any moment an adventure might occur that might earn a campus-wide committee assignment in the twinkling of an eye for him and even leave him as chair of it, or possibly even something more glamorous like becoming the head of an academic department (should one’s imagination be so capacious as to conceive of such a spectacular bounty…). Because of these and the like promises Derecho Panza (for so the young scholar was called) engaged himself as squire to his wise and slightly wizened neighbor.
These preliminaries settled, Quixote did not care to put off any longer the execution of his design, urged on to it by the thought of all the campus and the world was losing by his delay, given what wrongs he intended to right, what grievances to redress, what injustices to repair, what abuses to remove, and what duties to discharge. The repetition of such empty phrases as “Do less with less,” “Visioning refocused,” “Handcrafted education,” and pretty much every word of his college’s mission statement had convinced him that he was needed now more than ever. So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, one morning before the dawning of the day (which was Labor Day, long deemed a prime opportunity for undergraduate learning by the university for which he worked) he packed up his framed doctoral diploma and his dog-eared copy of Aristotle’s Ēthika Nikomacheia, let out a throaty yell of “Wa-hoo-wa!,” took his seat behind the wheel of Rocinante, and sallied forth (with Panza riding shotgun, natch…) upon the Avenida del Puente de Piedra in a state of the highest contentment and satisfaction at seeing with what ease he had begun his grand purpose.
Eventually, they came in sight of a drab seven-story building with a multitude of antennas extending from its rooftop. As soon as Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Derecho Panza, where a passel of monstrous functionaries present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in ethical debate about the proper purpose and function of a liberal arts college; for this is righteous disputation, and it is good service to sweep so callous a breed from off the face of the earth.”
“What functionaries?” said Panza.
“Those you may observe right there inhabiting this powerful tower,” answered his master, “with the suspiciously long, sticky fingers and the glaucous eyes that cause their short-sightedness.”
“Look, your worship,” said Derecho; “what we see there are not functionaries but rooftop antennas, and what seem to be their fingers and eyes are merely their many stems and joints.”
“It is easy to see,” replied Quixote, “that you are not used to this business of ethical disputation; those are functionaries, and if you are afraid of them, go away and betake yourself to writing another article about satire or something equally frivolous while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.”
So saying, he floored the gas-pedal of his Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Derecho sent after him as he tumbled out of the passenger’s seat, once again warning him that most certainly they were antennas and not functionaries he was going to attack. Quixote, however, was so positive they were functionaries that he neither heard the cries of Derecho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, “Flee not, vile beings, for a lone professor of philosophy confronts your perfidy!”
A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the rickety antennas swayed somewhat as a result, seeing which Quixote exclaimed, “Though you flourish more spurious arguments than the entire legislature of the state of Nueva York, you have yet to reckon with me!” He charged at Rocinante’s fullest speed (roughly equivalent to that of a golf-cart or skateboard) and fell upon the first antenna he found; but as he began enumerating his critiques of the absurd premise that decreased funding encouraged productive competition among academic programs for student enrollments, the wind whirled the antenna round with such force that it shivered his argument to pieces, sweeping with it minivan and driver, who went rolling together over on the plain in an even sorrier condition than that in which they originally arrived on the scene.
Derecho hastened to his assistance, crying out “Are you grievously injured? Did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only antennas twisting in the wind?”
“Hush, friend Derecho,” replied Quixote, “the fortunes of shared academic governance more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think that some powerful sorcerers from the capital have turned these functionaries into antennas in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity they bear me; but in the end their wicked arts will avail but little against my valid syllogisms.”
“How little you know about ethics, Derecho,” continued Quixote; “hold your peace and have patience; the day will come when you shall see with your own eyes what an honorable thing it is to wander in the pursuit of this calling of being a humanities professor; nay, tell me, what greater pleasure can there be in the world, or what delight can equal that of passing a sternly-worded resolution in Faculty Senate and thereby vanquishing one’s enemies? None, beyond all doubt.”
“Very likely,” answered Derecho, “though I do not know it; all I know is that since we have been on the faculty, we have never won any battle and it has been all budget cuts, voluntary and non-voluntary departures among colleagues, and morale-sapping rhetoric, mitigated only by an occasional ice cream social and the yearly invitation to waggle inflatable bear-paws at an ever-shrinking “funnel” of incoming students.”
“That is what vexes me, and what ought to vex you, Derecho,” replied Quixote; “but henceforward I will endeavor to have at hand some argument wielded with such passion and skill that no kind of administrative enchantment can bring harm to those who wield it.”
Thus talking, our heroic duo was driving back home on the Calle del Mercado when Quixote perceived approaching them a large and thick cloud of dust, upon seeing which he turned to Derecho and said: “This is the day on which will be seen the boon my fortune is reserving for me; this, I say, is the day on which as much as on any other shall be displayed the might of my philosophy, and on which I shall do deeds that shall remain written in the book of fame for all ages to come. Do you see that cloud of dust which rises yonder? All that is churned up by a vast army of various and countless higher education consultants that comes marching there.”
Quixote continued to hold forth to his wide-eyed companion: “Those consultants whom you see yonder in their earth-toned executive wear, who bear upon their shields both the totally edgy lower-case letters r, p, k and the alliterative motto ‘Maximizing Mission, Market, and Margin,’ are the sinister Staisloffians, eviscerators of colleges and universities throughout the land; those riding beneath the fluttering gilt-edged banner that reads ‘We create positive, enduring change in the world,’ are the malevolent McKinsey and Company; those others of gigantic frame and garbed all in green (because who doesn’t love the Celtics, amirite?) are the bean-counting behemoths from Boston Consulting Group.” And thusly he went on naming a number of consultants of one squadron or the other out of his imagination, and to all he assigned off-hand their logos, color palettes, and hackneyed corporate mottoes, carried away by the illusions of his unheard-of sense that all programs in a public liberal arts college should be properly funded by the state without regard to “key performance indices” and “five-year profitability projections.” Good God, what a massive horde of craven stuffed suits he named!
Derecho Panza hung upon his words without speaking, and from time to time turned to try and see the consultants his master was describing. As he could not make out one of them he said to him: “Maestro Quixote, devil take it if I can perceive any sign of those you talk about within that cloud of dust; maybe it’s all enchantment, like the phantom functionaries from earlier.”
“How can you say that!” answered Quixote; “don’t you hear their droning chants about ‘ensuring the financial health of the college’ and ‘focusing finite resources toward those programs that are most in demand in today’s marketplace’? Have you not received their emails requesting arcane figures about photocopying expenses dating back to the Mesozoic Era? Don’t you remember what happened at La Universidad de Virginia Occidental a few years ago when they marched upon it at Prince Gordongee’s summons?”
“I hear nothing but a great bleating of sheep and whinnying of jackasses,” said Derecho. And this observation was quite true, for by this time the teeming mass of animals being driven down the road by a group of local farmers had come quite close.
“Your fear,” said Quixote, “prevents you from seeing or hearing correctly, for one of the effects of fear is to derange the senses and make things appear different from what they are. If you are afraid of these reprehensible knaves, withdraw to one side and leave me to myself, for alone I suffice to bring victory to that side to which I shall give my aid;” and so saying he again gave full gas to Rocinante, shooting down the road like the world’s most languid thunderbolt. Derecho shouted after him, crying, “Come back, Señor Quixote; I swear they are sheep and jackasses you are charging! Come back! O what madness is this! Look, there are no consultants, nor cornball slogans, nor disingenuous reports being issued!”
But not for all these entreaties did Quixote turn back. He dashed into the midst of the squadron of animals and farmers, confronting them with spirited and intrepid data-driven justifications as though he were contradicting enemies who were interested in earnest and forthright disputation. The farmers shouted to him to desist, but seeing it was no use, they ungirt their “holistic approaches” and began to bombard him with them.
Quixote gave them no heed, though, swerving Rocinante both right and left as he kept saying: “Where are you, prideful rpk group? Come before me; I am but a lone combatant who would fain disprove your prowess mind to mind, and make you yield your sizable consultancy fee as a penalty for the wrongs you do to my plucky little college, to El Pais del Norte, and to the world in general!”
What Quixote believed to be a colorful chart showing enrollment declines in nine departments across campus struck him on the side (which was actually a well-packed ball of sheep-dung…) and buried a couple of ribs within his body. Feeling himself so smitten, he imagined himself grievously wounded for certain, and he drew out his pack of cigarettes, and putting one to his mouth began to draw a quantity of soothing smoke into his lungs. Ere he had succeeded in inhaling what seemed to him enough, there came what seemed to be a spreadsheet with two years of data about declared majors and minors (in reality a clod of donkey-excrement…) that struck him on the mouth, knocking the cigarette from his lips as well as displacing three or four teeth in its course. Such was the force of these blows that the poor philosopher reclined his driver’s seat and collapsed in agony. The farmers came up to the window, feeling sure that they had killed him, so in all haste they collected their animals and made off without waiting to ascertain anything further.
All this time Derecho stood on a nearby street-corner watching the crazy feats his master was performing, tearing his hair, and cursing the hour and the occasion when fortune had acquainted him with this batty logician. Seeing him defeated and noting that the farmers had abandoned the scene, he ran to Quixote and found him in very bad shape, though not unconscious.
“Did I not tell you to come back, your worship, and that what you were going to attack were not armies but droves of sheep and jackasses?”
“That’s how those thieves, my enemies, can alter and falsify things,” answered Quixote; “you must know, Derecho, that it is a very easy matter for those of this sort to impose whatever beliefs they choose upon us; and these malignant beings who persecute me, envious of the glory they knew I was to win in this battle, have turned the squadrons of the enemy into droves of sheep and jackasses after the fact. Now come hither, and see how many of my teeth are missing, for I feel as if there was nary a one left whole in my mouth.”
Alas, nothing can last forever, but all tends ever downwards from its beginning to its end, above all an academic career; and as David Quixote enjoyed no special dispensation from central administration to stay its course, the end and close of his days as an employed scholar came when he least looked for it. For—whether it was of the dejection the thought of his defeat produced, or a consequence of the head trauma inflicted upon him by the spectral consultants—a fever settled upon him and kept him in his bed for six days, during which he was often visited by his friends and colleagues, while his good squire Derecho Panza never left his bedside. Derecho, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself vanquished that kept him in this state, strove by all the means in his power to cheer Quixote up, telling him that enrollments had ticked up slightly in the college’s online programs and that there were even mutterings that some humanities faculty would be retained in order to teach general education courses in local prisons.
But for all this Quixote could not shake off his malaise. His friends called in the doctor, who looked at his likely teaching schedule for upcoming semesters and was not very well satisfied with it. The doctor’s opinion was that melancholy and depression were bringing his career to a premature end. Quixote begged his visitors to leave him alone, as he had a wish to sleep a little. They obeyed, and he slept more than six hours, having no occasion to rouse himself to grade student papers, as had long been the case during the darkest hours of the night. When he woke, he sat straight up in bed and in a loud voice exclaimed, “Blessed be those functionaries and consultants, who have shown me such goodness. In truth their mercies and wisdom are boundless, and no exertions on my part or anyone else’s can keep them back!”
Derecho listened with attention to his master’s words, and they struck him as more coherent than what usually fell from his lips, so he asked, “What are you saying, your worship? Has anything strange occurred? What mercies and wisdom are you talking of?”
“The mercies and wisdom,” said Quixote, “are those that I have just this moment perceived. My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of philosophy cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other edifying books—perhaps The Art of the Deal or Hillbilly Elegy or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vaccines, Fluoridation, and Raw Milk for Dummies—that might be a light to my soul. I feel myself at the point of retirement, and I would hope not to meet it in such a way that suggests my life’s work befits the title of lunatic emeritus; for though I have been one, I would not wish that fact to be made plainer at the end of my career. Call in to me my good friends and colleagues, for I wish to confess and give one last oratory from this podium at which I held forth for so many decades.”
The instant they arrived Quixote exclaimed (discreetly hiding his thesaurus behind his back), “Good news for you, my friends! I am no longer David Quixote of El Pais del Norte, but once again David C. K. Curry. Now am I the enemy of Socrates and Aristotle and of the whole numberless troop of their descendants; odious to me now are all the profane poppycock of Plato, the babbling balderdash of Boethius, the artless argy-bargy of Aquinas, the mindless malarkey of Maimonides, the onerous outrages of Ockham, the hapless hooey of Hobbes, the wacky warblings of Wittgenstein, the cantankerous codswallop of Camus, the ridiculous rantings of Rorty, the dotardly declarations of Dennett, and above all the flatulent flapdoodle of Foucault! Now I perceive my folly and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by the mercy of the functionaries and consultants, I have been schooled into my right senses; I now loathe what I once held to be the highest of truth.”
His friends and colleagues looked at one another, marveling at the erstwhile Quixote’s words. Though uncertain, they were inclined to believe him, and one of the signs by which they came to the conclusion he was indeed retiring was this so sudden and complete return to his senses after having been totally bonkers; for to the words already quoted he added much more, so well expressed, so utterly practical and rational, that it banished all doubt and convinced them that he was sound of mind.
Turning to Derecho, he said, “Forgive me, my friend, that I led you to seem as insane as myself, making you fall into the same errors I myself fell into, that there was and still is a place for philosophers in the academy. Where, where I ask you, is the P in STEM?”
“Ah!” said Derecho weeping, “don’t retire, master, but take my advice and keep teaching for many more years; for the most foolish thing a person can do in this life is to let himself retire without rhyme or reason, without anybody retrenching him, or any hands but melancholy’s making an end of him. If it be that you are retiring out of vexation at having been vanquished, you must have seen in your books that it is a common thing for philosophers to upset one another during their debates, and for those who are conquered today to be conquerors tomorrow.”
“Very true,” said one of their colleagues from Theatre and Dance (or possibly Art History, I’m not quite sure…), “and good Derecho Panza’s view of these cases is quite right.”
“Sirs, not so fast,” said the former Quixote, “‘in last year’s nests there are no birds this year.’ I was mad, now I am in my senses; I was David Quixote of El Pais del Norte, I am now, as I said, David C. K. Curry, and may my repentance and sincerity restore me to the esteem you hopefully once had for me. With this he signed his letter of resignation from the college and stretched himself out at full length on the bed.
A few months later, the official end of his career came, after he had graded his last papers and finals, attended his last interminable faculty meeting, and had in full and forcible terms expressed his detestation of books of philosophy (along with his vigorous support for the college’s ample financial commitment to nanotechnology and artificial intelligence programs). Many of the functionaries and consultants—who turned out to be precisely the shape-shifters that Quixote in his ostensible discombolulation had claimed they were—praised him upon this occasion and said that in neither of the two books of philosophy that they had read some of the CliffsNotes for as part of the Introduction to Philosophy courses they had sporadically attended (usually with hangovers) while they were undergraduates had anyone every comported themselves as ethically during the process of their own forced obsolescence as David Quixote, who amid the tears and lamentations of all present yielded up his office keys and seven-year-old laptop and walked out to Rocinante in the faculty parking lot—strangely deserted for high noon on a Wednesday—one final time.
Such was the end of the Ingenious Philosopher of El Pais del Norte, whose village was never indicated precisely in so that all of the towns and villages of the region might contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, much as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer.
But for me alone was David Quixote born, and I for him; it was his role to act, mine to record those actions. I remain satisfied, and proud to have been the first who has ever enjoyed the fruits of his story as fully as possible, for my desire has been none other than to deliver over to the detestation of humankind the false and foolish tales of the books of philosophy, which, thanks to the words and deeds of my true David Quixote, are even now tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall for ever, buried beneath a stack of copies of ghostwritten autobiographies attributed to various captains of industry, repentant B-list celebrities in rehab, and retired professional athletes. Farewell.