Sabbatical

A keyword, an itinerary, a panic

Sabbatical was one of the first words I learned. Or it feels that way. My father Wayne Booth was on one* when I had the experiences I scarcely remember in France and England at the age of three, with my mother, Phyllis Barnes Booth, older brother Richie, and the oldest, my sister Kathie, and part of the time, Wayne’s mother. Probably I didn’t really catch the word sabbatical until I had grown into the little girl who reflected that words are really not the same as what they refer to--not very good at saying what you really mean. The scene of this insight some time after the first sabbatical I went on, was with other kids in a front yard near the Earlham College campus in the town where I was born, Richmond, Indiana. Essentially, you will never find language to match experience, which was a new idea to me at that time.

At other times I cheerfully embraced a bounty of meanings at hand: I remember sitting at our kitchen table in Richmond, 603 SW A St., and picturing God, in white robes seated on a cloud gazing on us on Earth (a hymn book, story book, New Yorker cartoon could have taught me to picture that). Before Him swung a long pulley clothesline with all the words we need pinned to it, and he would pull the line to the right ones, unpin and send them magically down when called for. This sounds to me like a girl who already knows printed words, from kindergarten at Parkview School, newly built in said park, perhaps seven blocks away from our house, past the Catholic School. How could Booth kids avoid learning to read and reading a lot? I went to the nursery school run by my mother at Earlham College. I do remember Dick and Jane books, probably in the fall of first grade at Parkview.

It was on a leave that took us abroad because Dad was faculty leader of Earlham's study-abroad in London that I learned how to read chapter books to myself. We went to Rome in early December of the year I had turned five. I didn’t go to school in Rome though Richie and Kathie did; I remember making landscapes with crayons and reading Black Beauty all by myself in the high-ceilinged, marble-floored apartment often used by American families on sabbatical. Loong-a-tay-veray tray-deechie, I memorized that address (13 along-the-Tiber street). It was December 1959 when we arrived in Rome (having sailed from New York to Naples), to encounter the first tabletop silver Christmas tree I ever saw, and that spring we went to England, and in summer traveled on the Continent in the first car our family owned, as far as I was concerned: a VW van that we brought back to the U.S. (We had had no car in Richmond since before I was born.)

Sabbatical, Wayne would have explained, is time off-duty that a professor gets to do his research--not for R&R, not a furlough or free time; time for reading and writing that isn't interrupted by the tasks he's directly paid for (most of the professors were men 1950s-1980s, in spite of high tide of women in graduate studies in the 1920s). It's named after sabbath, the idea of a day of rest on the seventh day. Or first day of the week, Sunday. To confuse things. (Jews celebrate it on Saturdays, Hebrew "Shabbat," hence the term.) My father almost certainly didn't say everything in my parentheses, but I don't remember any conversation about sabbatical.

Today, David and I started thinking about jubilee. You could definitely call this Substack a Jubilee if it takes 49 (seven sabbaticals) plus the year you set your bondservants free, fifty.

I do remember standing at the railing of the vast oceanliner from New York (age five), murmuring the word deadline. Wayne has a deadline, the book he has been finishing. What menace in it! The ocean really looked easy to fall into. In the spring of 1960, we were back in Hampstead Heath (where we had stayed when I was three), Richie and I taking the Tube a few stops to a state school, New End School, Kathie on a different line to a girls' upper school with uniforms that a deeply admired. The index cards, literally for the index to The Rhetoric of Fiction, were in many small stacks like a collage pattern on the rug in one of the small apartment rooms, for that deadline. He made it (1961), and it decided a lot of things for us.

*a Guggenheim. My mother remembers that we managed living, the five of us, on the Fellowship’s $5000 on a trip abroad in ~1957-1958 because Earlham did not top the fellowship up; Earlham, she recalls (June, 2025; she was born in 1926), had no sabbatical program.

Everything is true, partially

I am about to go on sabbatical officially August 1. Most people, the almost complete total of humanity if you squint at the statistics, have never and do not now get sabbaticals. Most people who work for universities or colleges as teachers or researchers are losing the perk of sabbatical just as tenure tracks are shrinking. The librarians I'm smiling to as I explain that I’m stepping down (this was my idea, a succession) from Faculty Director of the DH Center after a lot of work to build and a lot of postponement of other things I'd like to do before the end of my working career (life...I only have probable twenty more years, who knows?)--the librarians don't get extended leaves. Their work often consists of the meetings I am trying to clear from my schedule. They seem happy for me, but how does it sound?

I'm in a frank panic, not hidden from myself at all. What do I do with all the time, unfettered? How will I feel with a renewed invisibility?

How I’ll go about this.

As I introduced the Substack when I set it up just recently: I will post at least weekly for the year of my sabbatical, 2025-2026. In the early days, I will showcase the kinds of things I want to write about. You may have noticed an asterisked note this time: I talk to my mother daily and we have enjoyed, with Kathie, round robins of emailed memories.

Everything is as I try to recall or confirm it, or other matters are researched somewhat. But I know from years of studying life narrative how artfully shaped it must be, not unlike history or literary criticism, and how the clothesline of heaven—sorry I don’t believe in this—is always filtered due to inefficiencies. Conversely, this isn’t even close to all the truth, and this isn’t my journal and I’m going to be careful about other people’s business.