To our readers

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that there's something about April. How else to explain the plethora of references the month seems to get in literature?

There's the unnamed nursery poet who first coined "April showers bring May flowers," of course. I'm guessing that the inspiration for that line came from Chaucer, with the opening of the Canterbury Tales: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote..."--lines that, still stuck within my memory after the first week of a freshman English course I ended up dropping, resurface into consciousness whenever I walk down the quad some April night and hear birds chirping at 3 a.m.

One line about April, though, has always sort of confused me. As it's also the most famous line on the subject, you've probably guessed it already: "April is the cruelest month," as T.S. Eliot wrote. I'm still not entirely sure what Eliot meant by that, but I've decided that I agree with him.

You see, this issue of TowerView is the seventh and final of my tenure as editor, and I'm not sure that I want to come to terms with the fact that I have to say good-bye to an undertaking that has changed me, perhaps, as much as I've changed the magazine. Certainly that is true of my experience with the University as a whole, which is also drawing to a close this April. With both, there's no question that if I had the opportunity, I'd do the whole thing again.

Unfortunately for me, that's not really a practical possibility. But my misfortune is TowerView's good luck, since it's now in the hands of my very capable successor Tyler Rosen, who's already written quite a few pieces for TowerView, including an illuminating look at intellectualism at Duke this issue, and has big plans for the future of the magazine. Particularly given the involvement of next year's managing editor Ruth Carlitz and the rest of the TowerView staff, I'll be the first to say that I'm excited to see how the magazine looks in a year.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I won't also look back at my year with TowerView with fondness, or wish I could take on the project of editing a magazine one more time. Maybe that's why Eliot described April as "mixing memory with desire."