In Oslo, all the airport employees were friendly; they had nothing to worry about. As every minute moved me closer to the purchase of egregiously priced bad food, I gazed out the windows onto a solemn ice-scape fringed with evergreens, dissociated from my past frustrations, and aided by the empty stomach achieved a pleasantly empty mind. I found the layover a helpful temporal/geographic/spiritual buffer zone, by which I mean all of these things—time, geography, spirit—stopped carrying meaning as I sat and sipped an IPA the price of two IPAs at elevenish in the morning that was in my mind fiveish in the morning. On the flight, the woman seated in front of me seized the opportunity when both flight attendants had to attend elsewhere to pilfer a bag of chips from the food cart. Life was so full of possibilities, modeled by the seemingly regular people all around us. Stealing chips never would have occurred to me.

[...] His students, I among them, were ready to be moved. But he never pushed, really. Of course, every interpreter has their own Marx, but his was a rather peculiar one. He conjured the philosophical spirit of a progresive professional liberal who might have voted for Bill Clinton and sent his offspring to private school while simultaneously leveling a totalizing critique against the progressive professional liberalism and privatization that Clinton introduced. The 1990s were famously a decade of irony, and that, my very first Marx, was imbued with a strange ironic nihilism. Your work will exhaust you, and you'll still do it because what else is there to do. Your wedding will be boring and bourgeois, and you'll still have one because individual sexual love offers what little redemption you're likely to find. Your children will be as entitled as you are, and you'll try to please them nonetheless. Let bushy, bearded Karl and clean-shaven me detail for you a guide to the travails inherent in your privilege, he seemed to offer.