"As the months passed by, Artie grew very weary, he was aware of this in himself. When he spoke to Evie of leaving the country, she said only, “Where would we go?” Adding, “Plus, I have clients who depend on me.” Artie could not find people who would talk to him about what was happening in the country. Carl LeBlanc said, “Let’s not go getting ourselves depressed. He just wants to destroy us, so don’t let him.” This baffled Artie. He preferred his nights out with Ken Moynihan because of the man’s kindness (and because Artie loved him), even though they never once spoke about politics.
—
The new principal was a woman about whom Artie immediately had misgivings; she seldom smiled, except at the younger faculty. One day she walked by his classroom as he was clapping his hands and saying to the students, “Boys and girls!” He was summoned that afternoon to her office, where she said sternly, “Not only is it demeaning for your students to be called boys and girls, but you are not even sure that they are all male and female. There may be students who are neither.” Artie just stood there, and then he said, “You’re right.” “You bet I’m right,” she said.
—
And so over time Artie no longer taught with the enthusiasm he’d had for many years; he was assigning Confederate soldiers now, and he did not even really care. He did not go to the soccer games anymore. He now had students who were using ChatGPT to do their assignments. They simply typed in a prompt and out came a paper. He thought it was worse than plagiarism, in a way. The new principal was in favor of using AI, she held a seminar on how helpful it could be in teaching.
And then one day as he pulled into his parking space at the school, Artie turned off the ignition and he sat there; the car made a few final small pinging sounds. He was flooded with a great understanding: He was not fully himself any longer. He could not have described this to anyone, and he could not describe it to himself, but his mind seemed to be increasingly separated from the world: His mind was here, and the world was there. He was on a downward-sloping path, and no matter how hard he would try, he understood that day as he sat in his car that something was going to happen to him and he would not be able to prevent it.
Almost, a sense of peace arrived with this.
It went through his mind faintly: I will not have the free will to prevent whatever is going to happen to me. And his memory of what seemed to him previously to have been a vigorous wonderment at the concept of free will made him smile just slightly now. He left his car and went inside. Going to my fate, he thought. Just going to my fate, that’s all I can do."
- Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say
