"It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk -- who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena college for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty -- confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college." Chap. 1, Everyone Knows, p. 1

"It's almost certain that had he retired, without incident, in his own good time, there would have been the festschrift, there would have been the institution of the Coleman Silk Lecture Series, there would have been a classical studies chair established in his name, and perhaps -- given his importance to the twentieth-century revitalization of the place -- the humanities building or even North Hall, the college's landmark, would have been renamed in his honor...