It is never too late to become what you might have been." This expression of faith from the pen of nineteenth-century British novelist George Eliot is the touchstone of the educational program in the Extension School of Harvard University. From the beginning, it is assumed that each of us has a dream of knowing that is unique and precious. The dream is nurtured and developed by the distinctive teaching style of the Harvard faculty, graced with scholarly knowledge woven with deep psychological insight.

My own dream began in a conversation with a friend in Grendel's Den, a nearby cafe, where we had gone to decide what we might do with the unclaimed portion of our lives. In a leap of imagination we enrolled in a course in playwriting, and the journey began.

Textual sources of knowledge are bountiful at Harvard. My favorite is Widener Library's charitable computerized reference system, which returned several thousand items to my request for information on Shakespeare. In agony and humiliation, I sought out the reference librarians and was presented with responses that can only be described as awesome! These gifted individuals extracted meaningful ideas from my gibberish intoned in the form of a question. They then approached their HOLLIS terminal as a beloved friend, rested their fingers on the keyboard, and played the instrument with a genius worthy of Yo-Yo Ma on the cello.

Soon after I initiated the exploration of Shakespeare's troubled King Lear, I found myself across the desk from research advisor Sue Weaver Schopf presenting a proposal that offered little that challenged me and nothing of a focused center. My experience with Dr. Schopf is echoed in the words of my fellow graduate, Enrique Calixto, whose brilliant thesis in the classics analyzes the first English translations of Plato's Symposium and the Phadera: "With patience and a genuine love of learning, Dr. Schopf find[s] the golden nugget that is the essence of the thesis." The golden nugget she proffered me was Immanuel Kant's theory of the sublime. With this theory, the empty center of the thesis acquired a central organizing principle.

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." For many, this is the voyage in Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. The aging king, wanting to retire with benefit of Social Security, redefined his youngest daughter, Cordelia, as his 401(k) plan. Lear divided his realm on the basis of the affluence he anticipated in each of his three daughters' expressions of love; Cordelia was to receive the most opulent portion. She apportioned the expanse of her devotion between her beloved father and a husband-to-be. With the solipsism that comes of being king, Lear, in a fit of choler, banished Cordelia to contemplate the wisdom of not loving him all. Her inheritance was given to her sisters, Regan and Goneril, whose noblesse oblige gave way to an infinite variety of fiendishness. They banished their father to a heath, where he dueled with a storm, presided over a criminal court in which his daughters, disguised as chairs, were condemned to various torments, and slowly emerged from the tempest in his mind to the truth of what he might have been. In the magnificent reunion of the tranquil king with his exquisitely benevolent daughter, Lear awakens and speaks:

Lear: I think this lady to be my child Cordelia. Cordelia: And so I am, I am.

Lear: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. . . . You have cause.

Cordelia: No cause, no cause.

They have become what they might have been.

In the tragedy of King Lear, Shakespeare juxtaposes the extremes of benevolence and malevolence, filtering them through prismatic structures that reveal the complexity of the soul's struggle with good and evil. As chemicals move from solid to vapor, sublimed of their impurities, the mind in the Kantian sublime is lifted beyond definition and the dense polarities of judgment into the formless realm of pure understanding of what has been termed by William Alfred "the terrible fullness of life."

My work with Professor Alfred was infused with his faith that each student has a distinctive and valuable way of understanding the world. That faith is supported by discernment and accompanied by a fine disregard for the inevitable lapse. As I struggled for coherence, he corrected my misspellings, euphemistically referring to them as typos. I was given absolute freedom to explore ideas through the lens of my own mind. I immersed myself in an analysis of the origins of King Lear's monumentality, illuminated by my mentor's generosity of spirit and an intuition that transforms knowledge into wisdom.

Helen Keller has defined love as not meaning "a vague, aimless sentiment, but a desire for good united with wisdom and fulfilled in work and deed." We have been loved into wisdom, work, and deed by many here at Harvard, and most of all by our friends and family who have listened to our joys and our sorrows, our moments of the Kantian sublime, and have sustained us on the way to "the terrible fullness of life."

We are becoming what we might have been.