After the Last Semester

The Limits of Empathy, Language Difficulties, Involuntary Retirement, the Corrosion of Injustice, Confronting Evil, and an Ongoing Search for Meaning. Quite the subtitle.

I have come to understand something late, and not comfortably: how separate we really are from one another—and how much of that separation is chosen.

Empathy is praised endlessly. It is invoked casually, almost ceremoniously, like a moral password that signals decency without requiring any effort. We are told to “have empathy,” as if it were a posture ra…