I miss the academic life. I especially regret the fact that I may never edit an annotated version of a famous work of literature, which is basically what I was born to do. As Nabokov and the editor of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes already know, sometimes a great work of art isn't complete without a trenchant critical comment in the footnotes. Yesterday I found such a moment in my Yale edition of Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

I did not take my leave of him, but had
Most pretty things to say; ere I could tell him
How I would think on him at certain hours
Such thoughts and such, or I could make him swear
The shes of Italy should not betray
Mine interest and his honour, or have charg'd him
At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
To encounter me with orisons, for then
I am in heaven for him; or ere I could
Give him that parting kiss which I had set
Betwixt two charming words, comes in my father,
And like the tyrannous breathing of the north
Shakes all our buds from growing.

And then, this priceless note from editor Samuel B. Hemingway: "Utterly worthless are the guesses of editors as to what Imogen's two charming words would have been."