She spoke first.

“I’ve always hated that.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you love it. But it’s really creepy.”

I told her I didn’t want to argue anymore.

She asked if I would be okay. I told her it didn’t matter. She insisted that it did, so I told her yes, I would be fine. This was false. I said it so she wouldn’t feel guilty. You cannot live with someone for two years without developing a kind of reflexive sympathy, and I knew that if I didn’t reassure her, she would spend the whole night awake, worrying about me. Not without cause: she was putting me out in the middle of a blizzard. She ought to’ve felt guilty. But pride forbade me from exploiting that.

“I’ll be fine,” I said again.

“The more you say it, the less I believe it.”

Still, she didn’t seem inclined to let me back in, her body blocking the doorway. Behind her was the apartment where we had lived and worked, where we had slept and talked, where we had made love. Observe the bulletin board, pinned with photographs and paper memorabilia, evidence of a shared history. Dinners with friends. Weekends in Salem and Newport. Remember the coffee table, a battered leather trunk unearthed at an estate sale. Adjacent to the front door, a nail juts out of the wall. Sometimes something hangs there, its absence a conspicuous reminder of all that has gone wrong.

I’m not a man easily lost for words, but standing there on the verge of expulsion, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Tears periodically rolled down her expressionless face, as though out of obligation. The contrast between us could not have been greater than at that moment. She was small and dark, bejeweled, glittering, and elegant. And I? Six-foot-three, ruddy, thick-limbed, capable of holding all my possessions—the entire physical evidence of my existence—in two hands without breaking a sweat.

This speaks primarily to how little I owned. Packing had been a depressingly brief process, everything fitting into a medium-sized duffel bag—which I’d had to borrow from Yasmina. Half the bag belonged to my laptop, my books, and six inches’ worth of unfinished dissertation. The other half contained my shirts, fraying at the cuffs; my jackets, mangy at the elbows; my wrinkled khakis and jeans. Jammed into the bag’s side pocket was one pair of brown loafers, scuffed beyond repair. All told, a thoroughly wretched wardrobe, one that reflected a self-image cultivated over years: rumpled scholar. Clothes belonged to the world of things. I belonged to the world of ideas. Fretting over my appearance would have meant acknowledging the importance of how others perceived me. Back then I found this idea repellent. To some extent I still do. Despite everything, part of me cannot relinquish the notion that I stand outside society, above its judgments.

It is a part of me that grows smaller every day.

Last, there was Nietzsche’s head. Half-head. The left half, to be precise. I’d found it in an East Berlin flea market. For the life of me I can’t say what I was doing there. (In the flea market, that is. I know what I was doing in Berlin: spending yet another travel grant doing yet more research for yet more of my never-ending dissertation.) I’ve never been one to make frivolous purchases, and everything one finds in such places is, essentially, frivolous. If memory serves, I was coming from the Staatsbibliothek, headed back to my tiny studio in Prenzlauer Berg, mulling over what I’d read that day. I must have strayed from my usual route, because when I stopped moving I found myself standing in a noisy aisle I could not remember entering, in front of a booth I could not remember approaching, holding an object I could not remember picking up.

Cold and heavy, it was made of cast iron, with a square base that sprouted into a half-bust, a human head split sagittally: one ear, one eye, the left half of a nose. The crudeness of the workmanship testified to clumsy hands wielding inferior tools: the proportions were off, the surfaces uneven, and the eye in particular had an unreal quality to it, set alarmingly far back in its socket, as though staring out from the void, the surrounding flesh seamed and trenched. Somehow, though, this lack of refinement contributed to the overall effect, and anyway, the moustache, even one half, gave it away. Really, who else could it be?

I looked up at the vendor. He bore a distinct resemblance to Joseph Stalin, which was surreal, because among the Soviet-era kitsch strewn across his table was a teakettle adorned with hammers and sickles and emblazoned with Stalin’s own face.

I nodded and turned the object over, revealing a bottom lined with peeling green velvet.

It was a bookend, the vendor said. Its friend—that was the word he used, Freund—was missing. He didn’t know where it had come from, although he theorized that it had once belonged to a professor. “Ein Genie,” he said, a genius, adding that the world would not be the same without him. Coming from someone who appeared to have neither shaved nor showered since perestroika, this seemed a wonderfully intellectual sentiment, and as a philosopher, I was moved to see how Nietzsche’s ideas, so often misunderstood, could still inspire the common man.

“E=mc²,” he said. “Ja?”

I think I did a good job of hiding my dismay, although at that point I felt it my responsibility to take the bookend into custody. Anyone who mistook Nietzsche for Einstein could not be trusted. I asked the price. He took a second to size me up, weighing my desire against my shoddy sportcoat, before asking for thirty euros. I offered ten, we split the difference, and I left elated, my bag fifteen pounds heavier.

Over the last few years, the bookend had become something of a totem, a reminder of happier times, when I could still get travel grants. By the night Yasmina threw me out, of course, all that had changed. My funding had dried up, with no more forthcoming. My teaching positions had been given away to others in greater need, those who still held promise, those in their third and fourth years of graduate school rather than their eighth and counting. My so-called advisor had not spoken to me in months. Around Emerson Hall I had become, if not persona non grata, then a white elephant.

I therefore cherished the bookend, keeping it atop the stereo cabinet in the living room, where I could see it from my desk in the corner. It offered encouragement. Moreover, it was my sole contribution to the decor. Yasmina had never objected, and to hear her true feelings took me aback. As I stood there, trying to conjure up an appropriately clever parting shot, I cradled it against my chest, protecting it from her.

“It looks like he has a badger on his face,” Yasmina said.

“Half-badger,” I said, vaguely.

I will assume the best of her and say that I don’t think her behavior was calculated to inflict maximum damage. She was self-absorbed, but I knew that about her and loved her all the same. Even when I began to sense us circling the drain, I’d always told myself she’d never be so thoughtless as to put me out without notice. I’d been wrong.

Though I wanted to go out on a zinger, in the end all I could muster was an attempt at irony.

“The life of the mind,” I said, holding up my meager stuff.

“Enjoy it,” she said and closed the door in my face.

We had gone most of the way toward Somerville when he cut the volume on the radio and said, “I hope you know you can stay as long as you like.”

It was then that I knew I needed to get out as quickly as possible.

Lying atop a creaking sofabed—Nietzsche’s one lunatic eye gazing down at me from the windowsill, the snow behind him swarming like a cloud of ideas—I began making a list of avenues to explore: job websites, Craigslist. Briefly, it occurred to me that I ought to get a copy of the classifieds. The idea of finding my destiny in a newspaper seemed quaint—indeed, ridiculous—and despite the abject circumstances, I smiled to myself in the dark. Now I look back and understand that getting ahold of that paper was, if not the first significant decision of my life, at least a necessary step toward all that followed, every one of my catastrophes.