I was sitting in the commons area of the University of Northern Colorado Student Center on a recent afternoon, sipping a venti latte and working slowly but productively through Gorgias’ “Encomium on Helen”, when there occurred five of the finest minutes my mind has ever encountered. Three young women walked into the commons from one direction and a fourth walked in from the opposite direction, all obviously meeting there by pre-arrangement. I glanced up, then took a second look; all were quite pretty, very well-dressed, and exuded the tentative sense of entitlement common among affluent sophomores. One of the women, a blonde dressed in a dark blue pinstripe pantsuit of light wool, stood with her back to me, a little more than an arm’s length away. I wouldn’t have noticed her, engrossed as I was in Gorgias’ theoretical defense of Helen of Troy, except that she took off her suit jacket and turned to ask me if she could hang the jacket for a moment on the back of one of the chairs at my table. She was classically beautiful, with a patrician forehead and nose, high cheekbones and full but pale lips of the upper class. I nodded my permission as if it were mine to give and attempted to return to Gorgias, but when she turned her back again I could not help notice her figure. Rather, it was the way her clothing treated me and the rest of the world to the pleasure of viewing her figure.
The pants, as I said, were a very light wool, and they clung to her form as if made of silk. The fabric did not fall away from the apex of her rear curvature to present a chaste, unified mound, but tastefully displayed two separate, identical buttocks. The trousers were not necessarily tight, mind you, but so perfectly cut and sewn as to fit her bottom as if they had been sculpted to it. I could not help but admire the curve of her shape, and I had the thought that there must be an omnipotent God, for such sensual yet pure perfection in female form could not occur accidentally in nature. I wanted to reach out and cup each twin, caress each just for a moment, not for the purpose of personal gratification or base arousal, but rather for the full and tactile experience of such sublime beauty. She stood so close to me that I was prevented from indulging in this desire only by the patina of civilized convention and the certainty of arrest and imprisonment. Instead, I contented myself with a long, languorous gaze, my surreptitious reconnoitering camouflaged by the various rhetorical and theoretical texts scattered about my table.
The ladies stood chattering for what must have been five minutes – long enough for the princess closest to me to shift her weight from one stilletoed foot to the other several times, thus briefly and subtly animating her perfect derriere and heightening my viewing pleasure – when a fifth woman joined them. Their group thus completed, the women moved off and the goddess turned to me, flashed another smile and thanked me for letting her rest her jacket thus. I smiled and nodded a sage and dignified nod, and watched her walk away. I sipped the latte again, the acrid flavor now more aromatic and full than before, and the quintet turned a corner and disappeared from my life.
I have decided that, were I to fail to earn my Master of Arts in English – that is, if some unforseeable catastrophe were to steal my life from me before the end of next May – all would not be utterly lost, for the thousands of borrowed dollars and three years of toil I have spent would be worth those five minutes.
