When my berkeley colleague the poet robert hass wrote for the new york times an account of the occupy cal event of 9 november 2011, he described the “strange contingencies” that struck his mind (even as the police baton struck his body). Since that day, when I was arrested (the police used a technique they call a hair-pull takedown) for linking arms with students to protect tents erected in solidarity with Occupy and in defiance of the campus's no-tents policy, I too have felt those contingencies. My decision to participate was no accident; I wanted to resist the conceptual and practical attenuation of the ideal of education as a res publica. But at the time of my arrest I had not yet recognized how much Occupy resonates with issues I have made the center of my scholarly life: vagrancy, mobility, freedom. This brief essay considers the new inflection Occupy has given to my understanding of the work of education. To exercise freedom of thought is not merely to engage heterodox ideas; it is to make thinking take place and take its time. It is to refuse attempts to constrain, by regulations concerning time, place, and manner, the public exercise of thinking.

I appreciate Harold Fromm's emphasis on the diverse approaches found in the ecocritical field and on the relevance of ecocriticism to the goals and activities of the MLA because this was the future envisioned by the early scholars. Ecocriticism is an expansive, interdisciplinary field of study that arose from a shared desire for a new literary theory and practice. This shared interest has made ecocriticism a robust field that continues to grow, as seen in the newest ecocriticism program in the United States: the literature-and-environment program that started in the fall of 2012 in the English department at the University of Idaho, spearheaded by Scott Slovic, Jennifer Ladino, Erin James, Janis Johnson, and Jodie Nicotra. The field is also becoming rooted as an academic discipline around the world, in countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Australia, to name only a few.

I am chagrined that I forgot to mention the 1991 MLA convention session that Harold Fromm organized and on which I presented. Fromm's idea of proposing a special session on ecocriticism at the convention to raise interest in the topic and perhaps to garner essays for the anthology bore fruit, and thanks to him The Ecocriticism Reader features essays by three of the panel's participants: Alison Byerly, Cynthia Deitering, and William Howarth, the respondent. (The third presenter was Sean O'Grady.) Now that my memory is jogged, I recall the madcap scramble for a bigger room and the impromptu collection of people's names and addresses. The resulting mailing list was used to announce the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) less than a year later, at the 1992 Western Literature Association (WLA) conference in Reno.

Readers of Marit J. MacArthur's “One World? The Poetics of Passenger Flight and the Perception of the Global” (127.2 [2012]: 264–82) may be interested in W. H. Auden's poem “In Transit,” written probably in 1950, which has something to say about every one of the issues that the essay explores. The abstract of the essay (424) could almost serve as a summary of the poem. “In Transit” may be found in any edition of Auden's Collected Poems; it was first published in his book Nones (1951) under the title “Air Port.”

I am grateful to Edward Mendelson for drawing attention to W. H. Auden in connection with my essay. There is in cultural-literary history an inherent risk that, caught up in the larger stories we are trying to tell, we may overlook the subtle insights of individual works of literature. To my own work in this area, I also try to bring the strengths of author-centered close reading. In this regard, the expertise of scholars like Mendelson is invaluable.