World Enough and Time

“Fred Carlisle’s World Enough and Time is a searcher’s book-a stubborn, loving, in-love-with-language attempt to ‘bridge the vast gap between what we are and what we long for.’ Places and people, lives once lived, distances embraced and overcome-all of this comes so vividly to life in Carlisle’s probing, clear-eyed excavation of his life’s deepest sources that Whitman’s ‘Who touches this touches a man’ comes continually to mind.”

-Thomas Gardner, author of Poverty Creek Journal, Sundays, and A Place of Encounter: On Poetry, Teaching, and Faith and many books of literary criticism

“Fred Carlisle’s World Enough and Time flows with poetic wisdom, reflective of a lifetime of dedication to family, friends, and higher education. Throughout, we become immersed in an understanding of the challenges confronting those who seek to garner meaning in academic purpose as well as the purpose of meaning in the life of the mind. The author’s eloquence remains constant throughout, but remains stolid in the face of loss, hurt, harm, and suffering. But a joy emerges as well: as depicted across the many examples of how to live with consummate dignity but also within the realms of a dignified simplicity across multiple places and locations. This is a beautiful book written by one who has lived on the front lines of relational struggles as well as through a wide range of professional, administrative, and academic contexts. The author resounds with an abiding commitment towards the significance of an academic life and to the spirit of education. At the end, this is a story told about a life in education brought to fruition not only in the name of the present, but at the behest of future generations.”

-Edward Weisband, author of Macabresque and Resignation in Protest: Loyalty to Team Versus Loyalty to Conscience

“A true Elder is one who has grown in all the ways we humans aspire to excel: the athlete’s principled competition, the scholar’s brilliance in learning and teaching, the leader’s astuteness in coordinating a miscellany of personalities in fulfilling an enlightened institution’s potential, and an Elder’s capacity to reflect upon and convert such a lifetime of experience.

Such a reflection is what you will find in these pages. Meet and understand those who inspired him, what he learned from the writers he came to know as a scholar and a teacher, what he saw from his leadership posts about the changing nature of education in America.

Through the essays gathered here, you can see the fruits of a life well lived and the values and skills that guided his (so far) ninety years of leadership, growth, and reflection.”

-Robert Siegle, author of The Politics of Reflexivity and Suburban Ambush and papers on postmodernism

Fred Carlisle grew up in Delaware, Ohio, the hometown he writes about in World Enough and Time. After military service and graduate school, he enjoyed a long academic career as an English professor, mainly at Michigan State University, and later as a provost at Miami University in Ohio and then Virginia Tech. He has written studies of Walt Whitman and Loren Eiseley and four memoirs, among them, Hollow and Home: A Story of Self and Place and The Lake Effect: A Lake Michigan Mosaic. He lives with his wife and favorite editor, Beth Obenshain, on her family farm in the Virginia mountains.

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